Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Monday, January 5, 2009

Now I Remember Why I Do This

Megan McArdle:

It's easy, in hindsight, to see that we should have stuck with the
tried-and-true wisdom; but there's a reason that evolution has trained people to
overweight recent experience. If you didn't, you'd be in big trouble when
the situation changed....Similarly, housing markets really did change, thanks to
things like zoning and environmental regulations that dramatically slowed the
pace and scope of new development on the coasts. Credit brokers really did get
better at assessing credit risk. it's just that housing didn't get as
difficult to build, or credit risk as easy to assess, as recent experience
showed.

Because we overweight recent experience, we overshoot on the bubbles.
But if we didn't overweight recent experience at all, it would take us 100 years
to notice that FICO scores were pretty good--or that many treasured innovations
in liberal governance hadn't actually caused society to implode. Is there some way to make us
weight only, always, the right things, to never go too
far in rewriting what we know about the world? Somehow, I doubt it.

YOU got it wrong. YOU believed your banker friends. YOU believed what you wanted to believe, supporting unregulated creative financing and derivatives. YOU were wrong and will continue to be wrong because you haven't learned a thing. Now you are trying to convince us that it could have happened to anyone, nobody knew, it was just one of those things? Just becasue you were a fool doesn't mean we are.

And you have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the meaning of the word evolution. Your education was as incomplete as it was ineffective.

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