Letters

There is a genre of video on Youtube called the "reaction video". One variant is a "first look," where the youthful participants watch some relic of old culture and give commentary, or more likely, show various facial and gestural actions to show their usually positive registration of the retro music or film clip. So we see two twentysomethings watching Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock or a Talking Heads video. Invariably the reviews seem laudatory--they love this or that song. When the viewers sometimes are younger--maybe a pair of teen brothers or high school friends--the reactions remain laudatory, despite an underlying, agonizingly stifled, sense of ridicule or derision.   The videos are nice affirmation for the oldster--yes the stuff we loved back in the day really was good. Who knows what the reviewers actually think, though.   But they offer an easy watching experience plus the chance to rehear some old favorites.. The reaction viewers are, generally, a congenial an

Thought for today  To the mystic St Theresa is attributed the wise saying that "answered prayers cause more grief than unanswered prayers. Truman Capote named a book of his short stories with the same aphorism, with St. Theresa's quote as its frontispiece.  We are own worst enemies and don't know what is best for us.  The idea is akin to that of unintended consequences--our efforts in one direction often create a contrary result, full of mishap, grief, and if one is of a humorous temperament, ironic self-defeat. We long for what is, if not what is the worst for us, what is irrelevant, toxic, stressful, or illusory, and finally just represent an unproductive expenditure of calories that could be better used.  This is an internalized version of the saying that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Along similar lines is the notion that overly planned and ideologically based efforts in a particular direction often create mayhem. The most active, well-mea

Behavioral Economics  Stock Market Psychology The name most associated with behavioral economics is Daniel Kahneman--the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and (nearly) public intellectual because his work is so familiar and he has published well-received books. Adam Tversky was his collaborator--a movie was made about the two. Unfortunately, Tversky died before the aware of the prize So, in trading stocks, we tend to have a fear of losing money. Loss aversion theory, the centerpiece of the theory, is that losses hurt more than gains feel good. So we sell our winners and hold onto our losers. We don't want to concretize a loss. If. a stock goes down, a trader is more likely to hold on hoping it regresses to the mean Worse, there is a tendency to buy more, or double down, once the stock has fallen. In effect, when we lost, we tend to become even more risky. Meanwhile, we grab that little win--feeling great about the appreciated stock. But those little wins are not sufficient to counte