Thursday

From the Notebooks

Nassim Taleb writes at the beginning of his first book, Fooled by Randomness: "We are still very close to our ancestors who roamed the savannah. The formation of our beliefs is fraught with superstitions--even today (I might say, especially today). Just as one day some primitive tribesman scratched his nose, saw rain falling, and developed an elaborate method for scratching his nose to bring on the much-needed rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserve Board . . .".

Besides the contrarian humor of the passage, it's striking because of the parallels to the thought of Ralph Adam Cram (and his convert, Albert Jay Nock). In his somewhat-famous essay in the American Mercury, "Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings," Cram made the obvious point that mass man is no more civilized than the average man 5,000 years ago.

Cram would have looked at those annual holiday videos of Black Friday madness (like I did here), compare them to the grain mobs of Rome, and make the obvious point: people were little better than animals thousands of years ago and they're little better than animals now. Cram conceded the brilliance of Aurelius and St. Paul, just as he would concede the brilliance of Nassim Taleb, but for the average guy, none of their brilliance is any more a credit to the masses than my neighbor's shiny new car is a credit to me.

And just as the savage on the savannah imputed meteorological importance to his nose scratch, the average journalist imputes economic importance to Bernanke's point scratch.