Avoiding the golden mistake

[jducoeur]

Those who are nervous about the markets and contemplating pushing their money into gold might do well to take a look at yesterday's article in the Motley Fool. Suffice it to say, they make the point that, while gold tends to look good in the short run, it's generally a poor investment in the longer term. And most people are pretty bad at figuring out when the short term starts turning into the long.

Looking at it, it's pretty clear to me that gold is currently in the middle of a bubble, and getting steadily more over-valued. Piling out of one bubble into another is probably not the best strategy...

Comments

[jducoeur]

During this cycle, no, but this cuts to the heart of my argument: the boom/bust cycles seem to be running particularly fast nowadays. Everyone tends to fall for this once, maybe twice. But if you experience several of them in your lifetime, that's enough opportunity to get the generalized clue, teach it to your children *viscerally* as opposed to intellectually, and bake it into the culture.

I'm not thinking in terms of the next three years, or even really the next ten. But if current trends continue, I could imagine things beginning to shift significantly in the 20-40 year timeframe.

The problem, of course, is that the visceral lesson gets lost a generation or so after it is learned. At that point, though, it tends to get ritualized into the culture. And now I find myself wondering what *that* culture looks like -- interesting detail for a science fiction story...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

There are still people alive who remember the Great Depression viscerally, and learned a great deal from that one event. It got 'baked' into the culture, in a number of ways, but sadly all impermanent.

"the visceral lesson gets lost a generation or so after it is learned. At that point, though, it tends to get ritualized into the culture."

I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first. Indeed, the first sentence seems to refute the second. If the lesson is lost, how does it get ritualized?

And even if such knowledge does get ritualized, rituals themselves are not very stable on a societal level over a period of generations. Historically, in some periods, some rituals lasted a long time (or at least it appears that way from my modern perspective). But the modern western world is one in which 'ritual' and 'tradition' are in near-constant flux.

[meiczyslaw.livejournal.com]

If the lesson is lost, how does it get ritualized?

In the old days, the power structures were organized in such a way that the folks at the top didn't forget. They had the time to think about how to fix the problem, and then they passed the solution down to the masses.

This is where you get the prohibitions against pork rooted in the Middle East. Other people could eat pork and not get sick, so you can't just simply say, "don't eat pork, it'll make you sick," when it obviously doesn't make Egyptians sick. No, the priests had to say, "God doesn't want you eating that. It's unclean."

But if there is no God, then the pigs must not be unclean! we say, and then end up with trichinosis.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

My point, though, is that that sort of strong, effective religious injunction doesn't seem to get created any more. Ideologies are too much in flux. The folks in power over the last few decades didn't forget the Great Depression; but they decided that the laws designed to prevent its recurrence no longer fit their ideology.

[meiczyslaw.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing the point -- the question you asked did not seem rhetorical.

I could also have brought up how family-oriented the professions were, and how family traditions could be used in place of religious ones.

(There was good reason for the nobility to be hereditary -- without a serious education system, the only way you learned the complex job of governing would be from your predecessor, one of your parents.)

We've broken these constraints to create flexibility and innovate, but we haven't replaced them with anything, thereby losing institutional memory.