Lord of The Flies

Being stranded on an island in the Atlantic, though not all that far out, without my beloved desktop I'm forced to keep this short. I hate laptops, and this one (not mine, fur shur) is horrid. These endeavors have talked about the arc of the future, from the many perspectives of the macros, micros, and quants. Data doesn't help a bunch, if the incentive structure which generated the time series you're relying on to predict the future really isn't there any more. Much like Oakland in the view of Stein.

In today's NYT Business Upshot piece, Shiller takes on the miscreants. He's explicitly dealing with the Behavioural Economics aspects of Mr. Market, although he doesn't use the term. Rather, it's a faint feint to Ebola.

Fundamentally, stock markets are driven by popular narratives, which don't need basis in solid fact. True or not, such stories may be described as "thought viruses". When they are pernicious, they are analogous to the Ebola virus: They spread by contagion.

In the end, what's behind the recent collapse of Mr. Market's arches? Time for Dr. Scholls.

Some people say that a theory of John Maynard Keynes -- known as the "underconsumption theory" because it says people inherently underspend once they become prosperous - is taking hold.

Mark Twain wrote, arguably, the best dissection of that idea with "The Gilded Age", a decade before Keynes was born (and before "Huckleberry Finn", for what it's worth). Even if you're Daddy Warbucks, you can use only so many fast cars, loose women, and fancy food. Economists have known this, if not by explicit name, since long before Keynes.

The Wiki has a, not fawning, piece: here.