Memes, Money, Madness
Courtesy of Tim’s THE PSY-FI BLOG
Meme Machines
The appearance and disappearance of investment themes over time is a fact of life – remember “you can’t lose with the railways”? Me, neither, but in the 1840’s it was a guaranteed winner until it wasn’t.
Other dubious ideas have more legs, like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the theory that most analysts can figure out which shoe goes on which foot. All of these ideas influence markets and participants and help move prices, sometimes with startling synchronicity. A popular theory of how this happens is based on the idea of the meme, a cultural equivalent of the gene, propagating itself through human brains and influencing group behaviour. So are we meme machines, buying stocks at the whim of transient ideas?
The Selfish Meme
Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme in his book The Selfish Gene : 30th Anniversary edition
The idea of memes was elaborated into the broader subject of memetics, the study of how memes actually work. There’ve been lots of popular works covering the subject but the idea is, in fact, curiously hard to get a handle on. At root the memetic approach is an attempt to use Darwin’s Big Idea – that evolution occurs through natural selection and random mutation – to culture and thus argues that culture is itself a complex, adaptive system. This is not uncontroversial.
Econbiology and Memetics
However, the attraction for financial scholars is obvious. There’s a fair amount of work going on in the world of econobiology which also sees the financial ecosystem as a complex, adaptive system altering itself in response to both changes in its environment – interest rates, central bank liquidity, etc – and its internal state – securities prices, investor confidence levels, etc. So it’s not a particularly surprising leap to find that theorists are interested in seeing whether memetics, a theory of how ideas change and effect culture, can help explain financial markets.
However, the research on this is surprisingly thin on the ground. Memes are a popular idea, which are well – if vaguely – understood in the general population. With some sort of post-modern irony it appears that the concept of a meme is, itself, a meme. The general use of the idea is quite common across the blogosphere but is less prevalent in mainstream research for, as it turns out, the quite good reason that it’s phenomenally tricky to define in detail: what is a “financial meme”?
What’s A Meme?
Still, a number of respectable researchers do think it’s an idea which is worth following up. So, for instance, David Hirshleifer and Siew Hong Teoh argue:
“Reasons, or financial memes (units of cultural replication …) can be simple (‘buy on the dips’), or can be elaborate structures of analysis, examples, terminology, catchphrases, and modeling (e.g., portfolio theory). The contagion of such memes, their effects on markets, and (more ambitiously) how combinations of memes evolve as they move from person to person, are the subjects of a missing chapter in financial theory.”
The researchers certainly make a case for the existence of financial memes. Their idea is that these culturally propagated popular ideas interact with individual psychological biases to cause mass changes in behaviour. They cite various example of how relatively simple popular ideas seem to have influenced the way that investors behave:
“Perhaps the most basic micro-evolution in financial markets is the perpetual seesawing contest between bullish and bearish memes. These fluctuate in response to fundamental news, the rise through mutation of salient new memes (‘The Internet changes everything’), and emotional factors that influence the public mood.”
Changing Popular Economic Models
Robert Shiller has suggested that markets sometimes change behaviour for reasons that are nothing to do with economics and everything to do with changes in the way people perceive the world. In Low Interest Rates and High Asset Prices: An Interpretation in Terms of Changing Popular Economic Models he suggests that the increases in asset prices seen across parts of the world since the 1980’s are directly related to the lowering of nominal interest rates – as interest rates have dropped money has poured into various assets – stocks, property, etc. Yet this, he argues, is based on a fallacy – the failure to comprehend that nominal interest rates are really irrelevant – what matters is the real interest rate, adjusted for inflation.
What Shiller is arguing is that we’ve seen a rise in asset prices fuelled by a combination of a popular idea – interest rates are low – and a behavioural bias – framing on nominal interest rates rather than real interest rates. Of course, a “popular idea” sounds suspiciously like a meme and there can’t be much doubt that such ideas do, from time to time, capture the imagination of market participants and lead to so-called social contagion – the sort of thing we discussed in Herd of Investors.
Others have tried to track the rise and fall of memes by looking at the spread of headlines and slogans across the mass media and the internet. The immediate problem in all of these cases is that you can only really know what the impact of an idea is after the event. So although meme-type ideas may influence market movements it’s a bit hard to see how they can be of use to investors. However, there’s a bigger problem.
Moveable Memes
This problem is really that the people behind the study of memes can’t actually agree on what one is, which rather reduces what might be a useful way of analysing ideas to a vague concept that everyone can happily use without worrying too much about what it means. If both "buy on the dips" and "portfolio theory" can be a meme it’s not entirely clear what isn’t a meme.
Critics of the adaptationist approach – the idea that all behaviour can be reduced to its neurological components and explained using Darwinian ideas of natural selection – have leapt upon this weakness. Here, for instance, is Luis Benitez-Bribiesca in Memetics: A Dangerous Idea:
“Memetics seems more like a disparate cocktail of concepts where memes are compared to genes, viruses, parasites, or infectious agents thriving for their own survival in human brains. Memetics seems more like a children’s fable or a virtual game, where memes are obnoxious , autonomous strange entities floating all over trying to control our minds. Despite the efforts of some bright intellectuals … memetics continues to be a pseudoscientific theory that poses more confusions than solutions for the study of consciousness and the evolution of culture.”
Thanks for the Meme-ories
Which is all a bit disappointing but carries the nasty sting of reality. While there’s little doubt that mass perception of economic concepts can impact markets both in the long and the short-term it’s hard to see how the study of memes can aid analysis of this process. The world changes as ideas change and the changed world causes people’s biases to trigger in different ways. Memes, sadly, don’t explain how this happens: they’re a useful short-hand, popular description of ideas, not a device that investors can use.
This doesn’t mean that some way of modelling the spread of popular ideas might not be of use to investors, at least in the short-term. Changes in the confidence of participants clearly affect markets and confidence is related to perceptions about real-world events. Trying to figure out which events are important is the tricky part. In the meantime a meme remains a meme, not a basis for investing real capital.
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