With media consolidation, it doesn't take much to jump-kick a trend. At one point, for instance, Shiller neatly compares market mania to the Y2K bug, which got the whole world in a lather last year before proving to be a big nothing. While government and business experts still maintain that all the attention to the problem prevented a millennium meltdown, Shiller and many other skeptics suspect that this was a case of media-fostered mass obsession generated by the public's fascination with computers and, last year at least, the millennium. As much as we worship individualism in this country, we can't wait to form herds, jump on bandwagons, and run a new thing into the ground with our collective enthusiasm for it. The golden mean, moderation in all things - those are hopelessly passe ideas.
Numbers are the path to truth.
For some reason, ratings of popular TV shows and the the weekly box office take for new movies fascinate people, as do humidity and wind-chill indexes, opinion polls, calorie counts, heart rates, and those ubiquitous lists of 10 best and 10 worst everything. It's America's mood ring. Everything must be on the Internet. Or about the Internet, which is our current overarching obsession. A good social crusade to join is one in which children, the poor, and the elderly are guaranteed Internet access.