К вопросу о природе бумов и кризисов

[pargentum]

То есть я прекрасно понимаю, что на это должен сказать знакомый с австрийской теорией бизнес-цикла. Но вот тем, кто считает, будто бумы - проявление неустойчивостей, присущих именно рынку (но не государству) - наверное стоит прочитать. И задуматься.
Хе хе хе.
Going to the Moon in a bubble : Nature News:

Going to the Moon in a bubble

A paper likening the Apollo missions to the dotcom boom raises interesting questions about how society makes technological leaps, says Philip Ball.

Philip Ball
Apollo 11Apollo 11 blasted towards the Moon on a wave of high expectations.NASA

It’s perplexing that the US space agency NASA seems about to focus immense resources and effort on repeating its achievement of four decades ago. If, as the current president intends, NASA manages to put another person on the Moon by 2020, this will have involved a longer gestation than the Apollo missions (counting that from John F. Kennedy’s declaration of intent in 1961). Why has a technological goal become less feasible than it was almost half a century ago?

In a provocative new article1, Monika Gisler and Didier Sornette of ETH Zürich in, Switzerland, offer a partial answer. They say that the Apollo programme was not ‘research as normal’, but an anomaly entirely equivalent to the speculative bubbles often seen in economics. In a bubble economy, expectations of future prices become temporarily inflated out of all proportion to that indicated by rational forecasting, leading to runaway speculation — and ultimately to a crash, as seen in the disastrous South Sea Bubble of the eighteenth century and the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.

During a techno-bubble of the sort exemplified by Apollo, Gisler and Sornette say, there are “unreasonable investments and efforts” in a technology, “derived through excessive public and/or political expectations of positive outcomes associated with a general reduction of risk aversion”.

This means, they argue, that the effort and resources that made the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing possible cannot be explained by any rational assessment of the economic or scientific value of the enterprise, then or now. The Apollo project swallowed up US$25 billion in 1960s money (vastly more in today's terms), and claimed three lives. And yet it vanished abruptly from public consciousness in the early 1970s, bursting as suddenly and as irrevocably as any economic bubble.

Bubble economies are often seen as a bad thing. They are, after all, based on rampant over-optimism, and invariably end in tears. But Gisler and Sornette point out that this conventional wisdom is being challenged. The medium-term consequences of bubbles can be catastrophic, but some have argued that they bring more robust long-term benefits, for example by creating valuable commercial infrastructure or stimulating new technology. Bubbles may hurt if you’re inside them when they burst, but in the long run they may generate collective social gain — look at the robustness of those portions of the e-commerce market that have survived into the new century.

This, the two researchers claim, may also be the case for scientific and technological bubbles such as the Apollo programme. If they’re right that major technical advances can depend on inflated expectations, the implications for the evolution of technology are striking. But are they right?
How the race was run

There is certainly something odd about the Apollo case. Traditionally, it tends to be depicted as an offshoot of the Cold War: a showy gesture by the United States to proclaim its technological might. If you can land a man on the Moon from 380,000 kilometres away, sending a nuclear-tipped rocket to hit Moscow should be child’s play.

There’s undoubtedly some truth to that: Sputnik and the Soviet space programme brought focus to the dilatory US efforts in space. “I do not wish,” said Lyndon Johnson, one of the key political movers behind Apollo, “to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon”. But as Gisler and Sornette point out, America decided to go it alone with a Moon shot only after Kennedy’s attempts to secure an American–Soviet collaboration — instigated just days before his assassination in 1963 — ran aground.

Then there is the issue of public opinion. Contrary to the image of unanimous public and political support, the Apollo programme often had to forge ahead in the teeth of substantial opposition and scepticism. “There was no commitment on succeeding Congresses to supply funds on a continuing basis,” wrote Johnson. “The program had to be justified and money appropriated year after year.” Public opinion fluctuated wildly: the initial enthusiasm after Kennedy’s 1961 speech declined within two years, and throughout the late 1960s only a small minority of the American population favoured increases in space funding.

Yet the Eagle landed, Gisler and Sornette say, largely because of the determination of a few key figures, especially Johnson, trading on Kennedy’s emotive legacy. This seems to partly undermine their own hypothesis: there was little of the widespread fervour that characterizes economic bubbles. But the programme does seem to share with those events the feature of over-inflated claims. Johnson’s assertions that it would “give ample returns in security, prestige, knowledge, and material benefits” bore little resemblance to the truth — a substantial industry was created, but only to provide its own justification.

It’s interesting to compare the situation today, where one can easily spot similar attempts to inflate the technical and economic benefits of human space exploration. Indeed, in a revealing speech in 2007, NASA head Mike Griffin admitted that these alleged benefits for the economy, science and national security are simply the "acceptable reasons" for exploring space, not the "real reasons". They are a way of justifying the expenditure to penny-pinching accountants, but they alone “don’t take us where we really want to go”, he candidly said.

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Griffin’s honesty here is commendable, although his facts are questionable: such immense expenditure for a handful of spinoffs (and no, Velcro, the soft drink Tang, and Teflon are not among them, as Griffin also admits) makes little economic sense either. And when Griffin draws an analogy with the programme of medieval cathedral building, he is more accurate than he realizes. These too were arguably the products of a bubble, but they were not, as he suggests, well managed and socially unifying projects. They too were often foisted on an unwilling population who were heavily taxed to pay for them and who derived little benefit from them. The great cathedrals also cost lives and sometimes failed catastrophically, and their disproportionate cost has been implicated in the decline of the Middle Ages. We have the luxury of being grateful for them; a medieval peasant was probably not.
Forever blowing bubbles

All bubbles must burst. As Gisler and Sornette point out, the Apollo missions were inevitably self-defeating: once they had achieved their aim, the public lost interest and the motivational arguments evaporated. (Has anyone thought that through for the latest calls to go to Mars?) And they are perhaps not the best example of a techno-bubble with long-term technical and economic payoffs — the real value was cultural, indeed profoundly so.

Yet if it requires something like a bubble phenomenon to realize a goal as enormous as this, what does that imply for our contemporary technological preoccupations? Some have argued, for example, that the challenge of finding clean energy sources should be approached like the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapon: sustained not with judicious little slices of the funding pie but with all the resources our societies can throw at it. One could make the same case for the global provision of clean water.

But what if projects of this magnitude don’t just happen because they’re important, or even vital, but because they need the right conditions to inflate the bubble, quite out of proportion to any cost-benefit analysis? Is that something we can even think of engineering and, if so, how? Can we distinguish in advance those bubbles that will bring genuine social capital from those that will lumber us with a futile and wasteful International Space Station, or a half-finished Beauvais Cathedral?

Gisler and Sornette make no pretence (yet) to tell us; but they and others are already exploring the issue2,3. One thing seems clear already: good intentions are not enough.

*
References
1. Gisler, M. & Sornette, D. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0273.
2. Sornette, D. J. Econ. Interact. Coord. (in the press).
3. Perez, C. Finance and Technical Change: A Neo-Schumpeterian Perspective (Cambridge Judge Business School Working Paper No. 14). [note: Year?]

Comments

[vvagr.livejournal.com]

а ведь это перед самым закрытием золотого окна приоисходило и вспышкой инфляции 70-х. видимо, должно совпадать с периодом денежной накачки, да такой нехилой, что золотой стандарт окончательно похоронила. интересно , это кто-то изучал?

[pargentum.livejournal.com]

Ну не сказал бы что перед самым - все-таки работы по проекту велись на протяжении всех 60х годов, и, насколько я понимаю, пик финансирования приходился не на сами запуски. Но все это, насколько я помню, действительно накладывалось на "возрастающую" фазу бизнес-цикла. Действительно интересная тема для исследования.