Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit In The Next Global Financial Meltdown, Second Edition

So Why Aren’t We Getting an Alfred Wegener or a Breakthrough Idea Like Continental Drift?

It’s an interesting question, and as we alluded to before, it’s very much related to that huge increase in funding for economists and economic research during the bubble economy. Life has been good for economists during the bubble economy. Partly as a result of the stock and housing bubbles, universities have had no trouble raising tuition enormously—way beyond the rate of inflation. This allowed them to increase or maintain professors’ salaries. It also allowed professors to spend little time teaching. Theoretically, they should have been spending more time researching, but the reality is often quite different, and what they were researching hasn’t been very productive, which we will discuss in more detail later on in this chapter.