Great story about New Mexico (it reminds me that I should take another vacation there!)
I found an excellent academic paper, titled Hyperreal Finance, by Professor Elton McGoun at Bucknell University, about the stock gambling mania -- here's a quote:
"Few want to withdraw their earnings, because the hyperreal game is the thing. There is no other thing that is quite so real. There is not so much a financial economy as a financial culture that has nothing to do with the underlying economy of things. Financial assets are valued not by what things they can buy, but by the cleverness required to obtain them. They are themselves something to be consumed. Each day the financial press prints an elaborate display of merchandise and financial journalists communicate the message that 'something important is happening every day and. . . you can't afford to relax, even for a moment.' [Lowenstein, 1988, page 4]"
The full article can be found at: panopticon.csustan.edu
He even cites a book I highly recommend, Joel Kurtzman's "The Death of Money", 1993. Kurtzman did his book just before the Web explosion, but he has a lot of valid points to make about what happens when wealth becomes a series of 0s and 1s in computers and loses its tangible quality. He also points out the dangers of having many kinds of financial systems that are electronically linked together. (Yes, you could even trade stocks electronically back in 1993 -- for example, I did it by dialing into Compuserve.)
Paul McGinnis |
