Two relevant conversations from the SD email list archive:
Where are we in the long wave?
Bill Harris asks, in 2003,
… should a reasonable person think we are now in the down side of a long wave? That the tough economic times we’ve seen for the past few years will need years to work through, as levels adjust? That simple, short-term economic fixes wont work as they may have in the past? That the concerns we’ve heard about deflation should be seen in a longer context of an entire cycle, not as an isolated event to be overcome? Is there a commonly accepted date for the start of this decline?
Was Bill 5 years ahead of schedule?
Preventing the next boom and bust
Kim Warren asks, in 2001,
This is a puzzle – we take a large fraction of the very brightest and best educated people in the world, put them through 2 years of further intensive education in how business, finance and economics are supposed to work, set them to work in big consulting firms, VCs, and investment banks, pay them highly and supervise them with very experienced and equally bright managers. Yet still we manage to invent quite implausible business ideas, project unsustainable earnings and market performance, and divert huge sums of money and talented people from useful activity into a collective fantasy. Some important questions remain unanswered, like who they are, what they did, how they got away with it, and why the rest of us meekly went along with them? So the challenge to SDers in business is … where is the next bubble coming from, what will it look like, and how can we stop it?
Clearly this is one nut we haven’t cracked.