No, there were lots of people who don't explicitly predict crashes, who still called this one. Michael Lewis' The Big Short is a fun overview. The Greatest Trad

No, there were lots of people who don't explicitly predict crashes, who still called this one. Michael Lewis' The Big Short is a fun overview. The Greatest Trade Ever is also good; the protagonist of that one is a merger arb, not a doom-sayer. And of course, countless people sold when they found prices too high. It seems very obvious to me that the establishment has to buy into it for a bubble to exist. Prices peak when optimism peaks, so you'll necessarily be able to point to people in authority who were too optimistic. The only alternative to that is a) for prices to undershoot rhetoric (arbitrage opportunity!) or b) for prices to never go down (result: buying is a safe bet, causing a bubble, leading to a crash). What I am suggesting is simply that there is no bubble in education nor can there be. Whatever the number of people that are educated so the better it is. This is what we call a "Bubble mentality". No P/E too high; it's the Internet! No collateral too poor; it's the ownership society! You clearly don't believe that; you would not be happy if, e.g., we were starving because every farmer decided to finish his Masters in English lit. There is a right amount of education, and it is not an arbitrarily large amount. What I'm pointing out is that by every measurable quantity, we're paying more and more for something of less and less value. Education you see is very different to an eighteen year old than to someone who has gone through life so well perhaps and has the freedom to provide us his wisdom through the internet. That eighteen year old perhaps your have forgotten does not actually quite know yet who he is or the nature of reality. Higher education provides him a good grasp of that. Not sure what you're trying to say. I'm 23. Education is beneficial. That doesn't mean it's worth trading anything of value for any extra amount of it. It is precisely this kind of thinking that leads to other bubbles.