Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“When I see a bubble forming, I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire.”

But they also represent a filtering out of the noise that can distract people from their mission.

Mimetic desire, he explains in his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred, is deeply antagonistic in nature and operates as the engine of social rivalry and conflict.

University faculty members spend about 40 percent of their research time writing grant proposals.

Bubbles literally add new dimensions to the way we view the world, and lead to more precise measurements within those dimensions.

In contrast to mere imitation, which refers to the positive effects of copying someone else’s behavior (which facilitates learning, for example), mimetic desire—desiring the other’s desire—opens up a deeply violent dimension.

Novel ideas, which don’t fit within a well-established canon, are significantly less likely to be produced, published, and widely read. This self-reinforcing dynamic fuels the logic of preferential attachment that controls scientific research, as each newly published paper disproportionately adds citations to papers that are already well cited.

The utopian spirit of modern Prometheanism is centered around the mythical titan Prometheus, who famously stole fire from the gods and gifted it to humanity, thereby igniting techno-economic progress. For this and other crimes, Zeus chained him to a cliff and subjected him to eternal torture.

Indeed, NASA needed so many integrated circuits that, by the end of 1963, NASA purchased 60 percent of all integrated circuits manufactured in the US.

The product, it allowed, can “do just about everything a vacuum tube can do, and some unique things which a vacuum tube cannot do.” 212 This descriptor is in the running for understatement of the century.