Really, all these bubbles are just an economic manifestation of the hyper-information processing problem that our society has yet to learn to deal with.
Just like it took quite a while for my Dad to learn to stop passing around "Bill Gates pays you for every email forwarded" email, members of our society have to learn to ignore all the internet marketing and media-generated hype.
Just like snopes.com was a valuable piece of infrastructure in weeding out the urban legends and reducing our forwarded crap email -- other societal/internet support is going to need to come into place to help investors weed through all the media and marketing hype.
The sad part is that change like this always produces victims who didn't catch on quickly enough. Given the magnitude of the changes brought on by this stage of the "Information Age", there's a lot of learning to be done and it's going to take another generation to develop the infrastructure and mind share needed so that typical members of society aren't so easily fooled by the falseness of the latest investment bubbles.
The genie is out of the bottle now, though. We need to get to learning, informing, and building solutions to the bubble problems. My biggest fear is that governments will [continue to] use this time of change as a power-grabbing excuse to drastically curtail our liberties and destroy many of the advantages of the Free Market.
Just like it took quite a while for my Dad to learn to stop passing around "Bill Gates pays you for every email forwarded" email, members of our society have to learn to ignore all the internet marketing and media-generated hype.
Just like snopes.com was a valuable piece of infrastructure in weeding out the urban legends and reducing our forwarded crap email -- other societal/internet support is going to need to come into place to help investors weed through all the media and marketing hype.
The sad part is that change like this always produces victims who didn't catch on quickly enough. Given the magnitude of the changes brought on by this stage of the "Information Age", there's a lot of learning to be done and it's going to take another generation to develop the infrastructure and mind share needed so that typical members of society aren't so easily fooled by the falseness of the latest investment bubbles.
The genie is out of the bottle now, though. We need to get to learning, informing, and building solutions to the bubble problems. My biggest fear is that governments will [continue to] use this time of change as a power-grabbing excuse to drastically curtail our liberties and destroy many of the advantages of the Free Market.