Daniel Gross has an insightful post at Slate called Declining Declinism: Don’t believe the historians and economists who say America’s best days are behind us.

Aside from Declining Declinism, I would also could consider Recessionary Recess and Falling Fallout. My kids remind me often of the double-negative wonder of “That’s totally non non-heinous” used effectively in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

>Bill and Ted take this to the extreme and use it to their advantage to really emphasize words. If something is heinous it is bad. If it’s non-heinous that’s *one* negative and it becomes good. It’s it’s non-non-heinous then the negatives cancel each other out but the emphasis of the word heinous becomes double, so it becomes really bad.

Here’s the gist from Dan:

>Economic prognostication is hamstrung by a tendency to extrapolate from recent trends far into the future. It happens at the top of a cycle—the Dow is going to 36,000! Housing prices will never fall!—and it happens when we plunge into a ditch.

Of course that was part of the problem with the way the bad news was delivered by Robert Shiller and Nouriel Roubini a few years ago. For some reason the former hasn’t retained his momentum and the latter is now loved by the media. Perhaps its more about the way they party.

One Comment

  1. Orlando February 11, 2009 at 9:50 am

    Unfortunately Mr. Miller there is $500 billion in Option ARM’s that will be resetting interest rates and/or reached 125% cap on loan to value ratio very soon.
    I believe that we will see some severe declines in housing values in next 12 months. This industry is getting the hose….

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