The Oddly Absent “Wesearch”

May 23, 2025

You might think that fields would very often apply their own methods to themselves. For instance, economists conduct a supply/demand or incentives-based analysis of the field of economics itself to understand why they focus on some areas and not others or why the field has become more math-heavy over time. Psychologists can also study the psychology of academic psychologists to understand the underlying psychological drivers that determine which areas of study are popular or why the repli...

Can you tell when you’re in the middle of a financial bubble?

December 8, 2017

Valuation bubbles seem obvious after they collapse or have a big correction (in fact, they often seem insane in retrospect), but is it possible to tell when you're inside one? If it is obvious to most investors that there is a bubble, presumably, that bubble would be likely to burst quickly. So, we shouldn't expect it to be particularly obvious from the inside of a bubble that one is currently happening. That being said, here are some signs that I think tend to be predictive of bubbles (t...