4 ms·

> The last 20 years has taught me to be suspicious of renormalization arguments. 2021-2008 = 13 < 20.

nostrademons 5y ago
I'm actually thinking of late-90s up through today: There were a lot geopolitical papers written then about the unipolar world and how we'd reached the end of history and liberal democracy had won. To the extent that people imagined threats to U.S. dominance, they usually envisioned state actors like Russia or China. Few people predicted the rise of international terrorism, widespread state failures, mass migrations, and internal destabilization of states. There were a fair number of commentators who said that the Internet was a fad and we'd go back to calling up businesses when we got tired of webpages. The dot-com boom was a bona-fide bubble - it burst, severely - and yet it also wasn't. I predicted the Amazon would go out of business in 2001 when their stock was down 90% in a year; it now owns retail, and is worth 50x that. People wondered how the hell a website for throwing virtual sheep at one another was worth $15B in 2007. It's now worth $942B, and blamed for taking down governments. We just had a page at the top of HN about someone's 2011 prediction that Bitcoin would fail. It did, for all the reasons they listed, and yet is still worth 20,000x what it was going for then. It's also had some 60-70% declines in that process. The general lesson I take from these is that life is a whole lot more random and absurd than a lot of people think it is. A lot of people who lose everything in bubbles are right about the direction of the trend (oftentimes on a subconscious level), but wrong about magnitude and timing. I see a lot of people asking whether today's housing situation is like 2008, and to my eye the fundamental forces are nothing alike. But 2005-2008 might have been the bubble before the trend, which sets up the causal forces leading to a genuine housing shortage now.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  I think the dot-com example is a good analogy for the current housing market. Prices in certain regions will just. keep. going. up. Maybe with dips here or there. But there's also a lot of speculation happening in down-market junk.
- chillacy 5y ago
  These are good insights, I get the sense maybe that you may be tracking your predictions or at least are revisiting them more than most people. The common behavior is to forget just how uncertain the past was. Or summarized: first things seem impossible, then they seem obvious.

I'm actually thinking of late-90s up through today: There were a lot geopolitical papers written then about the unipolar world and how we'd reached the end of history and liberal democracy had won. To the extent that people imagined threats to U.S. dominance, they usually envisioned state actors like Russia or China. Few people predicted the rise of international terrorism, widespread state failures, mass migrations, and internal destabilization of states. There were a fair number of commentators who said that the Internet was a fad and we'd go back to calling up businesses when we got tired of webpages. The dot-com boom was a bona-fide bubble - it burst, severely - and yet it also wasn't. I predicted the Amazon would go out of business in 2001 when their stock was down 90% in a year; it now owns retail, and is worth 50x that. People wondered how the hell a website for throwing virtual sheep at one another was worth $15B in 2007. It's now worth $942B, and blamed for taking down governments. We just had a page at the top of HN about someone's 2011 prediction that Bitcoin would fail. It did, for all the reasons they listed, and yet is still worth 20,000x what it was going for then. It's also had some 60-70% declines in that process. The general lesson I take from these is that life is a whole lot more random and absurd than a lot of people think it is. A lot of people who lose everything in bubbles are right about the direction of the trend (oftentimes on a subconscious level), but wrong about magnitude and timing. I see a lot of people asking whether today's housing situation is like 2008, and to my eye the fundamental forces are nothing alike. But 2005-2008 might have been the bubble before the trend, which sets up the causal forces leading to a genuine housing shortage now.

throwawaygh 5y ago
I think the dot-com example is a good analogy for the current housing market. Prices in certain regions will just. keep. going. up. Maybe with dips here or there. But there's also a lot of speculation happening in down-market junk.
chillacy 5y ago
These are good insights, I get the sense maybe that you may be tracking your predictions or at least are revisiting them more than most people. The common behavior is to forget just how uncertain the past was. Or summarized: first things seem impossible, then they seem obvious.