Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
even if there were two paths of equal length to go to the food, wherever it was, once an ant finds it, he recruits other ants.
And so you might expect after a while when they'd found both paths, both paths are equal, they would sort of split themselves.
Half would go down one path and half would go down the other path.
And what you actually observe is that they all concentrate on one path.
And if you wait long enough, they'll suddenly switch to the other path.
So with a friend, Hans Fulmer, a mathematician, we built a little model of that.
And then applied it to financial markets.
Same idea.
They all heard in one direction and they all heard back.
And it's not irrational.
That's the point.
You know, if the market's going up and everybody thinks it's going up, it's absolutely rational to believe it will go up.
It creates this problem that when you look at what individuals, what might be sensible for an individual, you do get on the big scale that we're talking about whole economies.
Things can go completely contrary to what you think any individual might choose to do.
Right.
That's why you get these huge movements in the overall economy.
It's the fact that they're doing these things together and looking at each other that makes difference.
You know, originally the efficient markets hypothesis started out with a man called Bachelier.
And when he defended his thesis, the man who wrote the report was Henri Poincaré, who was a famous French mathematician.
And Poincaré said, this is very interesting, very nice mathematics and so forth, but this is not what markets are about.
Showing 121–140 of 745 · page 7 of 38
← Previous
Next →