Artículos con la etiqueta ‘epidemias sociales’

The next market bubbles: Food and farm land

Por • 28 mar, 2011 • Category: sociologia

People frequently ask me, as someone who has written on market speculation, where the next big speculative bubble is likely to be. Will it be in housing again? Will it be in the stock market? I do not know, though I have some hunches. It is impossible for anyone to predict bubbles accurately. In my view, bubbles are social epidemics, fostered by a sort of interpersonal contagion. A bubble forms when the contagion rate goes up for ideas that support a bubble. But contagion rates depend on patterns of thinking, which are difficult to judge. Big speculative bubbles are rare events. Little bubbles, in the price of, say, individual stocks, happen all the time, and do not qualify as an answer to the question.