Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s
Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s
复制标题
集体幻觉和低效市场：1840 年代的英国铁路狂热
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2010
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
A. Odlyzko
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Odlyzko
19世纪40年代的英国铁路狂热从很多方面来说都是历史上最大的技术狂热，它的崩溃是最大的金融崩溃之一。令人惊讶的是，它几乎没有引起学术界的兴趣。特别是，没有人注意到，它提供了一个令人信服的证明市场效率低下。有可靠的量化指标向投资者（包括查尔斯·达尔文、约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒和勃朗特姐妹篇）表明，铁路运输的需求不足以提供预期的收入和利润。但是，革命性的新技术的力量，加上利益相关方巧妙地操纵公众的看法，引发了一种集体幻觉，使投资者忽视了这些考虑，他们坚持忽视了几年，直到线路投入使用，不可避免的灾难发生。与许多其他泡沫不同，英国铁路狂热有许多强有力的、直言不讳的、有见地的批评者。但他们中最有影响力的人患有另一种错觉，误导了他们对躁狂症构成的威胁。因此，他们的警告并不具有说服力，甚至可能适得其反，因为他们可能刺激了投资的增加。导致铁路狂热金融灾难的妄想源于19世纪30年代中期铁路狂热的经验。在文献中甚至很少提到，它的规模大约是19世纪40年代铁路狂热的一半（因此仍然远远大于互联网泡沫）。它最初的财务繁荣阶段确实崩溃了。但它在大型狂热中似乎是独一无二的，因为几年后，它被视为过早崩溃，因为在其旺盛阶段开始的项目取得了成功。这种狂热表明，识别真正非理性的泡沫是困难的。这两次铁路热还提供了关于技术和金融市场相互作用的其他各种教训。
The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing demonstration of market inefficiency. There were trustworthy quantitative measures to show investors (who included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and the Bronte sisters) that there would not be enough demand for railway transport to provide the expected revenues and profits. But the power of the revolutionary new technology, assisted by artful manipulation of public perception by interested parties, induced a collective hallucination that made investors ignore such considerations.They persisted in ignoring them for several years, until the lines were placed in service and the inevitable disaster struck. In contrast to many other bubbles, the British Railway Mania had many powerful, vocal, and insightful critics. But the most influential of them suffered from another delusion, which misled them about the threat the Mania posed. As a result, their warnings were not persuasive, and were likely even counterproductive, as they may have stimulated increased investments.The delusions that led to the financial disaster of the Railway Mania arose from experience with the railway mania of the mid-1830s. Seldom even mentioned in the literature, it was about half the size of the big Railway Mania of the 1840s (and thus still far larger than the Internet bubble). The initial financially exuberant phase of it did collapse. But it appears to have been unique among large manias in that a few years later it was seen as having collapsed prematurely, as projects started during its exuberant phase became successful. That mania demonstrates the difficulty in identifying bubbles that are truly irrational. Both railway manias provide a variety of other lessons about the interaction of technology and financial markets.