"It may not be surprising that in the exponential growth phase the estimate is very bad, but even in the linear phase (when 40+ points are available) the correct curve has not been found. In fact, it is only once the data starts to level-off that the correct s-curve is found. This is especially unhelpful when you consider that it can be quite hard to tell which part of the curve you on; hindsight is 20-20."
Does this perhaps explain why we are so bad at calling the top of economic bubbles and similar phenomena? Maybe there literally is not enough information until the very end. It's not that we're dumb. It's that we can't do the mathematically impossible.
I have a sense that this might be a very important and profound principle that might explain a lot of seemingly irrational behaviors.
I believe our supposed inability to predict economic bubbles (and other financial crises) is mostly just tautological: those crises we can predict never happen because they are "self-falsifying prophesies": If enough people believe the stock or housing market is overheating, they will stop buying or might even speculate against further rising prices.
Thus, any bubble that does manage to grow to significant size before bursting is necessarily "unforeseen". (of course because of that thing with the monkeys, the keyboards, and online message boards, the will always be plenty of people that did see it coming, but I would wait to buy their book until they do it a second time).
I know it's always trendy to hate on economists (some people have taken that idea all the way to creating cryptocurrencies and reinventing economics along the way). But comparing, say, the 2008 crisis with the 1920 or even the 1970s, I can't shake the feeling that maybe economists have become slightly better over time. The gold standard fandom that was all the rage for a while essentially rests on the idea that interventions by central banks are worse than doing nothing, and the evidence now seems overwhelming that we can do better than this (admittedly low) benchmark.
I think Taleb makes a similar point in his books - if you can forsee an economic crisis, you take steps to avoid it and therefore it doesn't happen. But then everyone asks why you were wrong in the first place, as the crisis didn't happen
Economists are the analyzers, not the players. I’m not under the impression that it’s popular to dislike economists. I disagree that bubbles are unpredictable because the assumption that the market is self regulating is the exact opposite of the market’s actual nature.
Maybe. But there also seems to be a tendency not to admit that any exponential phenomenon in the real world (Moore's Law, economic growth, etc) is always the climbing part of an s-curve. Call it wishful thinking, or optimism, or self-delusion, according to your preferences :)
For Moore's Law it has always been clear that it was going to end due to the size of atoms, it just slowed down earlier and faster than expected. EUV is at least 10 years late and no elegant solution has been found. It is still very difficult, complicated and expensive. I know somebody who works on EUV sources. The optics are even more difficult than the light sources. For the whole system, you get milliwatts on the wafer for megawatts of electrical power to the EUV source. But it's starting to work just well enough that it makes sense to use it.
Does this perhaps explain why we are so bad at calling the top of economic bubbles and similar phenomena? Maybe there literally is not enough information until the very end. It's not that we're dumb. It's that we can't do the mathematically impossible.
I have a sense that this might be a very important and profound principle that might explain a lot of seemingly irrational behaviors.