![]() ![]() If they were regular, they would be arbitraged away, which means that individual responses would dampen them: if I know that wokism is just a short-run phenomenon, I will feel less obliged to follow if many individuals think that the price of a stock will increase tomorrow, it will not because it will have increased before. In social matters, many, perhaps most, short-run fluctuations seem to be random or at least irregular. ![]() Short-run fluctuations of stock prices, for example, cannot be likened to a pendulum swing. But if the short-run fluctuations are random or irregular, that is, impossible to reliably predict, the analogy is faulty. If these short-run fluctuations show some regularity-like, perhaps, the consumers’ preferred car colors-the pendulum analogy may be good, provided we keep in mind that it is just an analogy. The first question to ask relates to the period of the hypothesized fluctuations, that is, how much time it takes for the pendulum to come back a short period or a long period correspond respectively to a short cycle and a long cycle.Ĭonsider regular or random fluctuations around a long-term trend. ![]() I suggest that this approach is easily misleading and seldom useful. ![]() People are often tempted to see social (including economic and political) phenomena in terms of a “swing of the pendulum.” In this perspective, problems such as wokism (just to give an example) will be corrected when the pendulum swings back. ![]()
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