Passage 5 Why We’ll Always Have More Money Than Sense
从众心理导致经济泡沫 《新闻周刊》

[00:01]When it comes to market bubbles and how they are created, very little,
[00:06]if anything, has changed. This is because human psychology has not changed.
[00:14]Massive bubbles are created when large numbers of people
[00:18]buy into "new era" stories that exaggerate how much the world
[00:23]has improved. Our animal spirits are sparked by these tales;
[00:29]we find them irresistible.
[00:32]And since as animals we're also given to the herd mentality,
[00:37]in a bubble we tend to invest too much in the most popular stories
[00:42]and continue to do so even after the bubble bursts.
[00:47]In the several decades since the worldwide rise of market economies,
[00:52]our perceptions of ourselves have changed greatly
[00:56]while young people back then might have become hippies,
[01:01]deeply skeptical of business,
[01:03]today's young people are very concerned with making money.
[01:08]Karl Case, recently conducted a survey of people's expectations
[01:14]of the U.S. housing market and found that,
[01:17]despite all the problems of the past few years,
[01:21]Americans still expect prices to rise over the mid
[01:26]and long term-even though my data show that between 1890 and 1990
[01:33]real home prices actually didn't increase.
[01:38]Bubbles are also encouraged by the Internet
[01:41]and by high-speed data transmission. People pick up ideas in newspapers,
[01:48]via TV, or online, then spread them via word of mouth.
[01:55]Anyone who's ever played the children's game of telephone knows that,
[02:00]once started, a story or idea takes on a life of its own.
[02:07]It's probably no accident that the tulip mania of the early 1600s
[02:13]occurred around the time the first newspapers and pamphlets began circulating,
[02:19]and that the crash of 1921 coincided with the first mass radio broadcasts.
[02:26]The Internet helped fuel the tech bubble and the financial crisis.
[02:32]I have no doubt that new social media like Twitter
[02:36]or Facebook will contribute to the next craze,
[02:40]or that the Internet will have other, unexpected effects on markets as well.
[02:47]Still, shouldn't we learn something from our past mistakes?
[02:52]The good news is that some of us do. In some cases,
[02:57]it's generational-there's evidence to suggest that people learn best
[03:03]from seismic events that happen to them in their youth.
[03:08]in other cases, however, people simply don't pay attention to
[03:12]the right information-or it may take them a while to come to it.
[03:18]Economics is an imperfect science, and it often goes off on tangents.
[03:24]For example, a few years back, economists were enamored
[03:29]with the efficient-markets theory the idea
[03:33]that the markets always know best. Now, post-crisis,
[03:38]that's finally changing,
[03:40]and even the G20 recently issued a warning about bubbles.
[03:45]But while this awareness may help keep them in check for a few years,
[03:51]it won't eradicate them.