In my review of Michael Lewis's The Big Short, I argue that it is ultimately a book about the factors that conspire to lead us into either dazzling rightness or staggering wrongness. To an almost eerie degree, Lewis's otherwise rag-tag protagonists embody the qualities you need to have if you care about being right. I don't mean if you care about looking right or feeling right. I mean if you care about trying to assemble, to the best of our flawed human abilities, an accurate picture of the world. Herewith, five reasons the guys in The Big Short were able to foresee the coming financial calamity -- and how the rest of us get stuff right, too.
- They were all outsiders -- in fact, in personality, or in both. As a result, they were neither unduly awed by authority nor unduly swayed by society. They didn't give a damn what Ben Bernanke or the CEO of Goldman Sachs had to say, and they either didn't know or didn't particularly care what the masses in the financial mainstream were thinking. Being a few thousand miles from Manhattan helped; so, probably, did Asperger's Syndrome (which one of the main characters is diagnosed with, and which is often characterized by a certain obliviousness to other people's thoughts and expectations).
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