Apart from ethics alleged culprit for the economic downturn that I know something about it optimism. Dany Kahneman is a princeton Professor and only psychologist who works on well being to ever win the noble prize. Quite finicky about how he is labeled he does not call himself a positive pschqyholoigist and urges not to call him one. But actually he is. Dany is ambivalent about optimism. On the one hand, he is not against optimism- he actually calls it the "Engine of Capitalism". On the other he indicts over confidence and delusional optimism, saying " People do things that they have no business doing because they believe they will be successful. " Delusional optimism is a first cousin of Kahneman"s "Planning Fallacy," in which planners chronically underestimate costs and over estimate benefit, Because they ignore the base line statistics for other projects that resemble theirs. Such optimism, He believes, can be corrected by exercises in which investors systematically remember and rehearse realistically how well similar business ventures have actually faired in the past. This is an exercise analogous to " Putting it in perspective" : the exercise we use to correct negatively " Delusional" pessimism in comprehensive soldier fitness.
Barbara, Ehrenreich, again. She is not ambivalent about optimism. In her chapter " how positive thinking destroyed the economy" She places the blame for the downturn of 2008 in America on positive thinking. She also describes Optimism as a critical tool for Stalinism's social control but somehow refrains from claiming that optimism was also a critical tool for hitler and Jbba- the- hut. Motivational Gurus such as Oprah, televangelist Joel Austin and Tony Robbins, she tells us, revved up the general public into buying more than they could afford to repay. Executive Coaches espousing positive thinking infected CEOs with the viral and profitable idea that the economy would grow and grow. What Ehrenreich tells us we need is realism, not optimism. Indeed, cultivating realism, rather than positivity, is the theme of her entire book.
This is vacuous.
The view that the meltdown was caused by optimism seems 180 degree wrong. Rather, optimism causes the market to go up and pessimism causes it to go down. Actually it is stocks go up when people are optimistic about their future worth and they go down when people are pessimistic about their future worth. There is no real value of the stock or a derivative that can be independent of the perceptions and expectations of investors. perceptions about what price that piece of paper will have in the future strongly influenced price and value.
