LauchsThis one is even dumber than the banking crisis, at least that one had complicated math
The common thread is a lack of understanding of system complexity and a lack of foresight/forethought.
And hindsight, I guess, if you consider that the great depression was at least partly triggered by the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.
And that the AI bubble is almost perfectly analogous to the Dot Com bubble. Makes me wonder if any of the early 20th century technology expansions coincided with the 1929 crash…
andyburkeRadio.
Ooooh, good answer.
Yeah, could be. Could also be related to the car, or electricity adoption. They were both a little earlier, but things moved slower back then too… And they were perhaps more directly impactful to many, especially the middle class.
medium.com/…/how-fast-does-technology-change-78d4…
But I’m not sure whether those were actually financial bubbles… though I guess they might have inspired some kind of excessive technological optimism regardless. It would be super cool to see a time series of public faith in technology over time…
Match!!this graph is neat because if i didn’t know what any of these are, i would presume Refrigerator is the most powerful and important invention every adopted, reaching ubiquity (>80% adoption) over the period from 1929 to 1945, ending the depression and winning WWII
Now that you mention it, it’s pretty wild that it kept climbing throughout WW2, when cars and clothes washers dipped.
Possibly there’s some artefacts in the data though, I guess. But yeah, definitely a cool graph with a lot of stories to tell.
Actually it was more cars, they made a huge change to society and people were able to take loans to buy them assuming they’d be able to pay with their jobs.