Ten Years Ago Today: May 18, 2008
- "Fundamental Weighting" and Indexing: Divide investors into... (i) passive investors, (ii) active investors who know more than the average active investor, (iii) active investors who know less than the average active investor but think they know more, and (iv) active investors who know less than the average active investor and think they know less. Group (i) should index.... Group (iv) should index.... Group (ii) profit from their knowledge... group (iii) and those of (iv) who don't act on their knowledge of their own ignorance are their lawful prey... everybody who thinks that he or she is in group (ii) should ponder hard whether he or she is in fact in group (iii) instead. "Fundamental indexing" is a form of (ii): those who engage in it are active investors, and their informational edge—the thing they know that the average active investor doesn't—is that there are enough noise traders of group (iii) out there in the market that book or earnings or other fundamental weighting factors provide an easy way to take on the role of the house in the casino that is the stock market. This is, I think, true—until there comes a day when there are enough investors following fundamental-indexation strategies that they become part of the least-informed half of active investors...
Little Brothers: Panel on David Brin's "The Transparent Society": Thursday May 22 Omni New Haven 3-5 PM George A&B: I am on a panel to talk about David Brin's decade-old book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? at the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: David Brin, Alan Davidson, J. Bradford DeLong, A. Michael Froomkin, Stephanie Perrin, Zephyr Teachout...
Ezra Klein Calls for the Total and Immediate Removal of America's Mainstream Political News Media: Makes sense to me: Ezra Klein: "A campaign without the 'gotchas': Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing years, he stepped out of campaign journalism. He began sending his speeches out directly... made a movie that asked people to sit down and listen to him for the better part of two hours, and did his rounds on interview shows on which he could have fairly lengthy conversations.... The result? A massive rehabilitation of his reputation, including in the eyes of the very political pundits who once spurned him.... Ask those pundits about the new Gore, of course, and they will sigh and search the heavens and moan that, oh, if he had only been this way when he was in politics, how different it all could have been. But he was.... His pipeline to the public was a gaffe-hungry media looking for ways to humiliate him".... The problems for the media are structural.... [T]he shows are really run as a type of soap opera.... Clips that can be easily and endlessly replayed to remind viewers of what they're watching and what happened in past episodes... the media hunger for out-of-character gaffes and missteps—those moments are crucial to the business model..." Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
hoisted
