From: micah glasser (micahglasser@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2006 - 22:53:45 MDT
The thesis we are debating, I think, can best be summed up as: hype is a bad
thing because it leads to overvalued markets and "waste investments" ;
these, in turn, lead to a "bust" cycle and the bust cycle leads to social
and economic disruptions that are undesirable.
This thesis actually makes a lot of sense - especially if you're an Austrian
School kind of guy like myself.
So here's my Austrian School analysis:
We start with the subjective theory of value and methodological
individualism. According to this view something is only valuable if an
individual perceives that it is. Price would then follow from the aggregate
of this subjective perception of value in the marketplace. Now because
finance is merely a system for allocating capitol investment it is only a
good system if the aggregate of subjective perception of value is accurate
(otherwise those things that need investment most will not receive it).
Now we come to hype. Hype, as I now define it, is a meme complex that
spreads causing the subjective perception of value to be completely
inaccurate on a large scale. This is a bad thing because it makes the system
of capitol allocation inefficient. Thus the need for market transparency.
The more good information people have access to the better investment
decisions they can make.
This leads me to my theory about market cycles and their relationship to the
singularity. Because access to good information is a prerequisite to
avoiding the spread of hype, and hence the bust cycle; and because better
and better access to information is a quality of the evolution of the
economic infrastructure (which leads to technological singularity), we might
conclude that the business cycle is in a trend that causes each successive
business cycle to be less and less severe and of a shorter and shorter
duration.
Also, looking at this whole cycle in the greater scheme of things, one might
describe the market cycle phenomenon as but one aspect of the co-evolution
that has arisen in the biosphere between culture/memes and techo/economic
infrastructure. It doesn't surprise me at all to see that spontaneous order
is coming together out of the apparent chaos of human economic/technological
activity - such order is often observed coming out of a chaotic system and
this process is understood mathematically.
Sorry if I got too far off topic.
On 4/19/06, Mikko Särelä <msarela@cc.hut.fi> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> > On Apr 19, 2006, at 10:22 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> > > If the bubble had not happened, people would still have flocked to use
> > > and enjoy the stuff that the internet made available, would they not?
>
> I was not only talking about people flocking and using and enjoying stuff
> in the Internet. I was also talking about people being paid to learn
> things like Java to do software engineering. In Finland at the bubble
> time, people from all educations with practically no experience in
> software engineering were pulled into companies to write code; to do other
> stuff necessary for software engineering. People who in another kind of
> world would never have learned to code one single line did because of the
> bubble.
>
> The result is that there's a lot more people with some skills making code
> and most of those people are not experts and even particularly good. But
> they have broken the barrier of transforming themselves into an
> algorithmic world (say SL0.5). Because of this, we have an entire extra
> generation of people who got to the paradigm when they were young.
> Otherwise, it would have taken another 5-15 years and my generation would
> have been mostly lost to the SL0.
>
> The market did something that the public education systems could not
> adequately do. It trained people to the new industry. That is an asset
> that the investors have no way of getting return on, it's the people who
> worked in the industries who got all that benefit. The financial markets
> did probably the biggest education campaign out of their pockets that has
> ever happened in the history of human civilization.
>
> A good example of the same kind is from history of railroads. Britain was
> practically the only country in the world that let people just build
> railroads without government interference. They experienced great booms
> and great busts. Still they created much denser railroad network in a lot
> faster time than any other country in the world. Lots of over investment?
> Yes. But market based overinvestment has the nice quality that it tends to
> look under every rock for profit. And thus also lots of good things get
> invested in - things that people would definitely have overlooked.
>
> > diversity of stuff funded by it for both fun and profit generated a lot
> > of rapid evolution. Sure, the Internet would have happened anyway, but
> > it would have happened a hell of a lot slower.
>
> Exactly.
>
> --
> Mikko Särelä http://thoughtsfromid.blogspot.com/
> "Happiness is not a destination, but a way of travelling." Aristotle
>
-- I swear upon the alter of God, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man. - Thomas Jefferson
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