Here's the thing. You don't know. Neither do I. Here Barry Ritholz is giving advice to investors back in 2016, but he's using decisions by movie studios and the primary elections of that year as his evidentiary basis.
There is an enormous degree of serendipity and good fortune that goes into a blockbuster movie. The same seems to be true of just about everything in life, from marriage to careers to stock portfolios.
How easy is it to mistake good luck and randomness for skill? How readily do we convince ourselves we understand what is going on, that we are in control of our destinies, when nothing could be further from the truth?
Consider this election cycle’s primary contests. Bernie Sanders, a 74-year old Jewish Socialist was widely expected to drop out almost immediately. Despite the delegate math, he’s still in the race. And almost all of the pundits had proclaimed — quite loudly, too — that Trump had absolutely no shot at winning the GOP nomination. You were admonished to beware their calls of “Peak Trump” last year, because (say it with me, people) nobody knows nuthin’.
I don't know what the next four years will hold, but there are likely to be surprises. One datum I do consider is Dump's obvious and apparently accelerating mental and physical deterioration. I certainly don't look forward to a Vance presidency, but I really don't know what it would be like. Nor do I know what will happen with an insane demented clown trying to be president. But as Ritholtz concludes:
We have discussed the futility of soothsayers trying to forecast too many times (see this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this). Attempting to accurately assess complex systems filled with random and interrelated variables, exogenous factors and unknown human behavior is a fool’s errand.
We don’t like to admit it, but nobody knows anything — and that includes me and you.
3 comments:
I hate to say it, but physically, Shitler looks healthy.
We only know what people should have done after the fact. Post hoc wisdom.
Hear! Hear!
Over the last few centuries we've learned to add new features to our civilization at an ever increasing rate. The problem with this is that an extra doohickey doesn't add to the complexity we have to manage; it multiplies it!
The reason is that an added feature can potentially interact with every other aspect of our civilization.
The general formula for complexity is approximately (n/2)!, where n is the number of components involved.
We're also continually discovering new factors that affect the way things turn out. In situations like this a true conservative is very,, very careful about how he fiddles with things. And we now have a person who is emotionally 6 years old running the whole shebang.
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