Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.
Interpretation
Speculative markets are often misleading, and recognizing this doesn't necessarily improve prediction accuracy.
Robert J. Shiller highlights the complexity of speculative markets where illusions can cloud judgment. While it's essential to recognize the follies within these markets, understanding them doesn't simplify forecasting outcomes, as the dynamics of these illusions are unpredictable and can change rapidly.
In practice
During a financial seminar discussing market behavior.
Those on the downside of rising economic inequality generally do not want government policies that look like handouts. They typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them. Redistribution feels demeaning. It feels like being labeled a failure.
That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.
Money management has been a profession involving a lot of fakery - people saying they can beat the market, and they really can't.
We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters - that is, the outlier events that matter the most.
If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.
I think that a lot of people in all walks of life have the impression, of course, that, 'I specialize in something. I can't - I don't have the time to read other things. I'll just go to pure entertainment when I'm relaxing, and then I'll come back to my pure specialty.' That produces - that attitude produces idiot savants, unfortunately.
Rover did not know in the least where the moon's path led to, and at present he was much too frightened and excited to ask, and anyway he was beginning to get used to extraordinary things happening to him.
I've had people say to me, 'You'll never sell handbags. You don't work with leather, and leather is luxury.' To me, it's the complete opposite: leather is everywhere - it's so cheap a material; it's so mass produced. Over 50 million animals a year are killed just for fashion. For me, it doesn't have a luxury element to it.
I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, - superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.
Here is a tree rooted in African soil, nourished with waters from the rivers of Afrika. Come and sit under its shade and become, with us, the leaves of the same branch and the branches of the same tree
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