From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2006 - 23:58:29 MDT
Wow those snipers must be distracted. As far as the dot.com bubble stimulated investment in hardware infrastructures it was a societally good thing, even if balance sheets didn't reveal this. But as far as it propped up failed e-commerce business models, it was just another tulip craze and probably hurt some AGI investment concerns on this list.
micah glasser <micahglasser@gmail.com> wrote: 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.
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