Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-11-2008

[andrewducker]

• 8 really, really scary predictions about the economy
  (tags: economics 2008 depression predictions)
• The digested read: The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling
  Very, very funny
  (tags: funny books harrypotter)
• Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf'
  The chorus of warnings was echoed by the Shanghai Daily, which wrote: "A strong kiss may cause an imbalance in the air pressure between two inner ears and lead to a broken ear drum."
  (tags: weird biology kissing)
• Man's genes 'key to baby's sex'
  Raar! My sperm have The Power!
  (tags: genetics gender)

Comments

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

A thought occurs about those 'scary predictions'.

The value of an economist isn't in predicting whether or not a bubble is a bubble or whether or not it will crash. I don't know what it is, but it isn't that. Any idiot can see bubbles forming, it was obvious to a whole wack of people during the dot-com bubble, and it was obvious to a whole bunch of people during the housing bubble.

Also, tulips.

I mean, seriously, any idiot could order videos from Kozmo.com, along with laundry and grocery service, and realize that they weren't going to go anywhere, and that's what most of the dot-coms were!

But now I'm just complaining by rote, as I don't like seeing economists take hard stands on issues and advise people to do the sort of things that'll prevent the market from regaining confidence.

I should go into economics just to develop a branch of econ theory centered around the idea that we're just guessing what's going to happen.

[andrewducker]

You say that anyone could have predicted the crash, and it was obvious - but during the bubble the vast majority of people seemed to think exactly the opposite. I spent the entirety of the dotcom bubble wondering why nobody else could see it - but for some reason the majority of them couldn't.

We should celebrate the occasional person who is capable of seeing the obvious.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's the matter of the majority not being able to see it, I think it's a matter of the way confidence in the market works, combined with the market's momentum.

In other words, at the start of the bubble, it looks awesome and is. Bubbles collapse though, and that gets factored for. And then the evidence shows up that it's a bubble, and everyone knows that it's a bad idea because of the crap companies that are making millions overnight. But by then, the ball is rolling and it takes a while to catch up, because most of the people who know it's a bad idea are still making money off of it.

I keep wanting to paint it as a plane full of money that's going down, where everyone is packing money into suitcases until the very last minute.

[andrewducker]

I disagree - an awful lot of people just don't get it. I had an argument with someone at work about a year ago because they said they didn't need to put money into a pension because their house was worth a small fortune and house prices always go up faster than inflation.

This person was reasonably smart (decent coder, capable of walking and breathing at the same time), and we work at a financial company. He just didn't understand markets.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

If he had got a pension he'd be no better off now...

[andrewducker]

Depends on the guarantees on it. I have a career average pension, which doesn't rely on the stock market doing well...

[anef.livejournal.com]

Warren Buffett (hope that's how you spell it) refused to buy into dotcoms on the basis that he didn't understand them and didn't want to put the time into researching them. And was widely ridiculed at the time. His point was that some of them were good businesses and would survive, but the vast majority weren't. That seemed very sensible to me.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. If you don't understand something then you have no way of telling whether you're buying a complete fraud.

I remember, at the height of the DotComBoom, seeing the stock price of a telecoms company double purely because it had added ".com" to the end of its name...