I have a friend who regularly reminds me that if you jump off the top of an 80-story building, for 79 stories you can actually think you’re flying. It’s the sudden stop at the end that always gets you.
When I think of the financial-services boom, bubble and bust that America has just gone through, I often think about that image. We thought we were flying. Well, we just met the sudden stop at the end. The laws of gravity, it turns out, still apply. You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream — a home, for no money down and nothing to pay for two years — without that eventually catching up to you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters. I just hate the idea that such an ethic is more alive today in China than in America.
“Parts of Wall Street got disconnected from investing in human endeavor — helping business to scale and take up new ideas.” Instead, they started to just engineer money from money.
Charles Mackay wrote a classic history of financial crises called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” first published in London in 1841. “Money ... has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
我对于金融一直抱有一种狐疑的态度（也是我为什么不喜欢学金融/搞金融）。但问题是，哪怕是我的狐疑是正确的，它被Law of gravity证实的时候也仅限于这样的百年不遇的一刹那间。在其余的时间我都要为坚持狐疑付出代价。比放说，相信着房市不落的神话的大众会投资房市猛赚一笔，而像我一样狐疑的人就被视为缩手缩脚很少有机会分一杯羹。那么损失的是狐疑的人，至少是相当长的时间里面。于是哪怕开始狐疑的人都开始对自己理解的基本法则产生怀疑，甚至背弃它, 跟大家一起做梦。
在理论世界里面，大家关心的都是均衡点（即落地之后）。而在真实的世界往往是处于均衡点之间。肥皂泡存在的时间是如此之长，以至于我们基本上可以假设它一直存在下去了。于是就有了一个推论，审时度势的聪明人应该跟大家一起吹皂泡，分享当中的红利，但同时悄悄做好肥皂泡破裂的准备。而独善其身远离这个肥皂泡的人则只好承受寂寞。
最近一位友人职场上的意外也让我感到，一个人再怎么成功，基本的东西还是不应忽视的。
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