An announcement for the New Year

. But my account of it is both overly detailed and at the same time incomplete.

that's why God created book editors, Justin. Just finish the damned thing, invite your editor to be as critical as possible, and then redo the stuff you aren't satisfied with.

The basic story is that academic belief in the stock market's rationality continued to ebb while public confidence in it seemed to grow until everything came crashing down in 2001 or so.

for instance, a good editor would look at this sentence and say "wait a second? Are you saying that public confidence in the rationality of markets increased? That sentence needs work, because its counter-intuitive." (If anything the evidence suggests that public confidence in the irrationality of markets increased --- "irrational exuberance" and all that)

I think it's fair to say that, over the course of the 1990s, the idea that the stock market knew best gained an awful lot of strength in public discourse. Just think of the tendency to judge companies by their market capitalization. Very few people outside of investing circles did that before the 1990s, but by the end of the decade everybody was talking about Cisco or Microsoft being "worth" $400 billion (or whatever).

Obviously, by the end of the decade that belief was starting to wobble. But it was in 2000 that Thomas Frank published One Market Under God, in which he made the case that the stock market had come to be accepted as the ultimate arbiter of pretty much everything. And I think he was right about that (I don't necessarily think he's right about everything else).

Anyway, thank you for your editing assistance. It's helpful to hash things out like this. And I already turned in a sloppy "finished" manuscript a while ago. What I'm doing now is cleaning it up.

i have no idea what the hell your book is about even after your pithy, lively summary, but then again i figure dumdums are not your target readership. here's my advice: write a crap book! i did. and here i am, the proud author of a book that remains not selling in bookstores. more advice: get pregnant, have a baby and write it during maternity leave! even more advice: promote it till you drop, literally, and wind up in hospital!

my friend, your finished tome will be a masterpiece, and all the reviews will note how you spent four (five, seven, 10) years on perfecting it.

Only two chapters to finish up! Congratulations!

Didn't even Greenspan say that we might have to interpret the economy differently because of new developments like the internet? Then the bubble burst.

If it's five, seven or 10, my wife and son may both divorce me.

Daddy!!!!!We are NOT going to divorce you! But you better watch out about your birthday present...

cc, they may not divorce you. but my husband "required" a plasma tv upon my publication. better pony up a wii for jr. now.

I'm having a good time thinking about what I will require upon publication. I imagine it will be sparkly. VERY sparkly.

CC Jr. says he has some very sparkly Pokemon cards, so that should take care of it.

Lisa is right. Just turn in what you have. It is not always wise to have all of the facts and answers to every question that people may ask. You are trying too hard to right the perfect book. The perfect book does not exist. Even if your book is good, it may not sell. There is no need to waste time writing a better book. Write a savvier book!

The more polarizing the book is, the better it will sell. You need to make your book more controversial in order for the book to be picked apart. Making book reviewers, bloggers, and TV hosts angry is more imporatant than being correct and getting a positive book review. This is why people go on Bill O'Reilly's show. They know that Bill is going to bully them, but they get free promotion and an opportunity to make Bill angry. That promotion is worth more than the book itself.

Oh, yeah. That title sucks. It sounds like 95% of the other economic books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble's collecting dust. Make the title simple and catchy. Remember, the packaging is even more important than the product.

Good luck with your book. However, the mere possibility publish a book on about this self-evident truth is a clear indication that something big is out of order.

Don't rely on the publishing editor. They're too busy and they won't have time to research for you. Hire (ie free intern) a grad student to write and then brainstorm. And not an MBA student, but an economic historian type, preferably more economist minded than historian if you want them to crunch some numbers. MBA students can't write, and historians can't do math. Then work on cutting it all down.