Outsized Delusions OUZILLY, France – ‘In the short run,’ says billionaire investor Warren Buffett, ‘the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine.’ Put another way, in the short run, the stock market responds to myths and fads. In the long run, these give way to facts.
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Remember, myths are not necessarily untrue. But whatever truth they have seeps from human imagination, not from facts imposed by the outside world.
Gravity, for example, is a fact. You jump out of a second story window; it doesn’t matter how hard you flap your arms or what you think, gravity will pull you down toward the sidewalk.
Corporate profits, too – though they can be manipulated and massaged – are facts. Mythical profits don’t pay real bills. But there are other ‘facts,’ too… those that owe their existence entirely to our myth-making ability.
They may begin life as plausible observations. But then they have a way of growing, expanding and mutating into outsized delusions – ones that may cost a nation its money and its soul.
Were the pharaohs divine? Apparently, the ancient Egyptians thought so. For 3,000 years, they were so devoted to this myth that they applied almost the entire economic surplus of the Nile Delta to building monuments in their honor.
This post was published at Acting-Man on September 23, 2016.
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