The best possible time to be alive
Posted on February 19, 2007 by Richard Beddard
Filed Under Ramblings |
I’ve just started reading ‘The Origins of Wealth‘ by Eric Beinhocker. It promises a radical remaking of economics. I’m expecting a lot, but I didn’t expect the book to deliver it before I’d even got to the contents page. On the page before is a quote from Arcadia, a play by Tom Stoppard. It encapsulates how I feel about now, and no doubt how the author feels about economics. It sent me on a short Google-quest to establish the context, which led me right back to Interactive Investor. Here’s the quote:
A door like this has cracked open five or six times
since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible
time to be alive, when almost everything you
thought you knew was wrong.
Apparently one of the themes in the play is the transformation of science in the nineteenth century. I haven’t read or seen it, I gleaned that much from the first four results of my search.
To my surprise, the fifth result was a direct hit on our own FTSE 100 discussion forum. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, although it’s hidden away, the FTSE 100 discussion is one of the more vibrant nooks and crannies on the site. A likely place as any to find investors spouting literature, or drawing comparisons between the industrial revolution and the information revolution.
The post I’d googled was an apocalyptic rant about the information revolution written in 2004. Its author was, in a tiny way, participating in that revolution - as I am in writing this blog. I was reminded of that on Saturday when the Financial Times published a round-up of finance blogs (subscribers only).
Apart from Martin Lewis‘ blog at Money Saving Expert, which as the name implies focuses on the other side of the money making coin, ours was the only UK blog the FT mentioned. We can probably also count number three on the list though: WebCab Services Investment Journal, based in the Isle of Man. The Journal looks a lot better than it sounds. I’m going to spend more time there, starting with a post entitled Real stockpickers outperform, something I’ve long suspected.
To the FT’s list we could add its own Alphaville, a blog-like torrent of reporting on dealmaking in the City, and AB Enquirer, which I discovered last week. I’ll skim lightly over the fact that AB stands for ‘All Black’, and its writer is an exiled New Zealander.
Foraging the Internet for information-rich UK finance blogs is proving surprisingly unfruitful. Right now there seems to be more on subversive cross-stitch. I hope that will change though or, or maybe I need to look harder.
To steal a phrase from Mr Stoppard, perhaps the notion the blogs aren’t there is just one of the many things I think I know, that is wrong.
Comments
One Response to “The best possible time to be alive”
Leave a Reply
[...] doesn’t actually mention the tools of traditional economics might be broken, the subject of a very interesting book I’m [...]