Word: myth
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...Contributor David Van Biema takes an in-depth look at the Mormon Church, the fourth largest in America, and its current high-profile involvement in politics, while our business columnist Justin Fox explains why financial markets don't necessarily know best, a piece based on his new book, The Myth of the Rational Market...
...1990s and 2000s, in fact, this myth of the rational market was embraced with a fervor that even Irving Fisher never mustered. Financial markets knew best, the thinking went. They spread risk. They gathered and dispersed information. They regulated global economic affairs with a swiftness and decisiveness that governments couldn't match. And then, as debt markets began to freeze up in 2007, suddenly markets didn't do any of these things. "The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year," former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said at a congressional hearing in October...
Fisher fell on hard times after the 1929 crash--getting by thanks only to the generosity of a wealthy sister-in-law and his employer, Yale--and so did the myth of the rational market. For a few decades, financial markets were seen as unruly beasts that had to be tamed with tight regulation to help protect the hard-earned savings of regular Americans. But memories of the 1930s eventually faded, and in the 1950s, the idea that markets knew best began its comeback. This was part ideological reaction to the antimarket conventions of the day, part scientific progress...
...Khamenei would always come and say, 'Shut up; what I say goes.' Everyone would say, 'O.K., it is the word of the leader.' Now the myth that there is a leader up there whose power is unquestionable is broken." -Azar Nafisi, the author of two memoirs about life in Iran, on how Khamenei's decree that the election results be reviewed - which he issued shortly after praising Ahmadinejad's "divine victory" - has undermined his claim to absolute authority. (New York Times, June...
...think President Obama's rhetoric, and his emphasis on empathy in difficult times, might trickle down to engender the sort of kindness you stress in the book? Hard times don't necessarily make people nicer to each other. I think that's a myth. When people feel really anxious and fearful for themselves and their families, that doesn't necessarily foster kindly feelings. It can create a really bunkerist mentality. I think that there are many wonderfully encouraging things going on right now, and certainly Obama's presidency is right up there. But I think people need to feel confident...