Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Reading Assignment

If you really want to understand the current speculative frenzy, and we have had two back-to-back in less than 15 years (which is historically unprecedented), you owe it to yourself to read John Kenneth Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria.

I am very far from a fan of Mr. Galbraith but he does hit the nail on the proverbial head here. It's only 110 pages, and you can get a second-hand copy for less than $5.

In most sciences, you can safely ignore history because it is not relevant. Nobody cares about false theories (except perhaps, the philosophers of science.) But, Economics is not a science, however much its practitioners claim otherwise. Ultimately, it relies on humans, and human behavior, and history is the guide to that.

Contrary to the vast majority of my profession, I claim that history, basic arithmetic, and accurate analysis of data is a far better guide than all the stochastic differential equations that the professional economists have developed put together.

History, of course, will prove who's right.

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