"WHY WE NEED BUBBLES"

Interesting post and following discussion by Tom Evslin at AlwaysOn:

The bubble-busters are on the loose. The blogsphere is full of ideas for puncturing the next bubble before it inflates. Irrational exuberance may be made a capital crime; it certainly is politically incorrect.

Preventing bubbles would do more to protect incumbents and inhibit innovation and economic progress than Sarbanes-Oxley squared and a ban on silicon and software combined. The capital raised in bubbles is the explosive charge which launches the technologies that change the world.

Nothing great has ever been accomplished without irrational exuberance!

Radical new technologies suffer from a chicken and egg problem. Railroad tracks are useless without trains and vice versa. Modern roads and modern cars require each other and a network of fueling and repair stations to be useful. The modern Internet required a two order of magnitude growth in infrastructure, an enormous investment in access, huge amounts of content, and a critical mass of users – all at once.