
Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 10, The Price Is Not Right, p. 216
BuzzFlash interview (2004)
Context: Stock market bubbles don't grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality — but reality as distorted by a misconception. Under normal conditions misconceptions are self-correcting, and the markets tend toward some kind of equilibrium. Occasionally, a misconception is reinforced by a trend prevailing in reality, and that is when a boom-bust process gets under way. Eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable, and the bubble bursts.
Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 10, The Price Is Not Right, p. 216
“Double, treble, quadruple bubble, watch the stock market get into trouble…”
Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Grim Tuesday (2004), p. 75.
Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VIII, Thorstein Veblen, p. 224
“They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.”
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi
Context: In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.
“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.”
Note to the 1946 edition
Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911)
“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”
Source: Selected Diaries
2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)
Mark Skousen; in: The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, Vol. 60, Nr. 3-10 (2010). p. 7
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 13