一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day13 passage5

Passage 5 Why We’ll Always Have More Money Than Sense
从众心理导致经济泡沫 《新闻周刊》

When it comes to market bubbles and how they are created, very little,
if anything, has changed. This is because human psychology has not changed.
Massive bubbles are created when large numbers of people
buy into "new era" stories that exaggerate how much the world
has improved. Our animal spirits are sparked by these tales;
we find them irresistible.
And since as animals we're also given to the herd mentality,
in a bubble we tend to invest too much in the most popular stories
and continue to do so even after the bubble bursts.
In the several decades since the worldwide rise of market economies,
our perceptions of ourselves have changed greatly
while young people back then might have become hippies,
[01:01]deeply skeptical of business,
[01:03]today's young people are very concerned with making money.
[01:08]Karl Case, recently conducted a survey of people's expectations
[01:14]of the U.S. housing market and found that,
[01:17]despite all the problems of the past few years,
[01:21]Americans still expect prices to rise over the mid
[01:26]and long term-even though my data show that between 1890 and 1990
[01:33]real home prices actually didn't increase.
[01:38]Bubbles are also encouraged by the Internet
[01:41]and by high-speed data transmission. People pick up ideas in newspapers,
[01:48]via TV, or online, then spread them via word of mouth.
[01:55]Anyone who's ever played the children's game of telephone knows that,
[02:00]once started, a story or idea takes on a life of its own.
[02:07]It's probably no accident that the tulip mania of the early 1600s
[02:13]occurred around the time the first newspapers and pamphlets began circulating,
[02:19]and that the crash of 1921 coincided with the first mass radio broadcasts.
[02:26]The Internet helped fuel the tech bubble and the financial crisis.
[02:32]I have no doubt that new social media like Twitter
[02:36]or Facebook will contribute to the next craze,
[02:40]or that the Internet will have other, unexpected effects on markets as well.
[02:47]Still, shouldn't we learn something from our past mistakes?
[02:52]The good news is that some of us do. In some cases,
[02:57]it's generational-there's evidence to suggest that people learn best
[03:03]from seismic events that happen to them in their youth.
[03:08]in other cases, however, people simply don't pay attention to
[03:12]the right information-or it may take them a while to come to it.
[03:18]Economics is an imperfect science, and it often goes off on tangents.
[03:24]For example, a few years back, economists were enamored
[03:29]with the efficient-markets theory the idea
[03:33]that the markets always know best. Now, post-crisis,
[03:38]that's finally changing,
[03:40]and even the G20 recently issued a warning about bubbles.
[03:45]But while this awareness may help keep them in check for a few years,
[03:51]it won't eradicate them.