How can you claim to speak for 99% of people?
10 years ago
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The boom and bust cycle of hopes and inflated expectations has been repeated frequently since the Second World War when industrialization gave it momentum and the impact of televised mass media took hold. Waves of technology-charged consumerism drove the economy to new heights until the 1990s techno-bubble burst and the Y2K balloon broke. But that didn’t stop the geniuses of the U.S. stock market from contriving ways to blow up what was left of the economy by creating another wave of false expectations around the housing market. Now we have another media-driven phenom in the making in the person of Barack Obama. How long can any mortal withstand the pressure he will be under?
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"In the 1970s I once had occasion to discuss the ability of economists to foresee large-scale events during the twenty-odd preceding years .... Not a single one of these world-shaking developments had been foretold."
Robert Heilbroner in Twenty-First Century Capitalism.
Once again, with the collapse of the U.S. economy, we have failed to predict the obvious. Or at least, we failed to act on it. What is it about human nature that blinds us to the inevitable?
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