The Unwisdom of Crowds

The Weekly Standard ^ | Christopher Caldwell

[Texas Fossil]

I downloaded the .html version and it is pretty good. It does include the illustrations of the print version. And the hot links on the index work well.

Best regards,

de Texas Fossil

[Mikey_1962]

Well I remember the three chapters on economic bubbles the best: The Mississippi, South Sea, and Tulipomania. The rest of the book was interesting but had no lasting impression.

I read it 35 years ago and never forgot the lesson: Boom Bubble Bust.

Or as I told my wife when we were watching “Flip this House” by the time they have a TV show about flipping houses the bubble is about to bust, and it did.

[the invisib1e hand]

thx.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

One line of argument was that people who did not have a ton of money in stocks, as well as those who rented rather than bought the houses they lived in, were foolish. This line of argument peaked at the turn of the decade, when Americans elected a president who had argued that the public was foolish for not launching its retirement savings onto the open seas of the stock market.

A perfectly sound critique of "privatizing social security" - except for the minor point that if you do not invest that money in the real economy, what the government is doing is investing in "safe government bonds" which represent IOUs that the government writes to itself. Which is to say, the government is not investing that money at all. It is simply dissipating it.

IOW, the choice is between "unsafe" investments and "investing" in a Ponzi scheme. Which, in the long run, is no investment at all.

[Kevmo]

bmflr