A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
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At 19 I was lucky enough to start making money from my music career, and when I was in my early twenties I trusted financial experts and advisers to guide me with how I invested money.
People without financial knowledge, who take advice from financial experts are like lemmings simply following their leader. They race for the cliff and leap into the ocean of financial uncertainty, hoping to swim to the other side.
A visionary is someone who sees the future with both insight and foresight: Insight into the deeper causes and meaning of events in the world, and foresight, or an intuitive grasp of the big picture, such as the trajectory of politics and popular culture.
What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.
Too often, it seems, conservatives have scorned experts as incompetent, biased, or otherwise worth ignoring because they came up with answers that didn't fit their politically desired answer. Often, they proclaim experts have a liberal bias. Of course, plenty of Democrats have voted for conservative ideas, but that is beside the point.
While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.
Anyone interested in the past, present, or future of banking and financial crises should read The Bankers' New Clothes. Admati and Hellwig provide a forceful and accessible analysis of the recent financial crisis and offer proposals to prevent future financial failures. While controversial, these proposals--whether you agree or disagree with them--will force you to think through the problems and solutions.
The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.
The generally accepted theory is that financial markets tend towards equilibrium, and...discount the future correctly. I operate using a different theory, according to which financial markets cannot possibly discount the future correctly because the do not merely discount the future; they help to shape it.
As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?
Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
Hindsight. It's like foresight without a future.
The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.
The guru is a tremendous tradition because is a guide, it's a guide to life, and we can guide energetically, we can guide in our thought, we can have a prayer that travels wonderful things.
A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.
Whilst large organisations need foresight, they are also notorious in their bias for short term thinking, sometimes rejecting or even suppressing foresight.
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