MICHEL PIREU: Like history, you just can’t trust facts, especially not with money
It seems that when you’re down there’s no way to go but up, but you could go further down
Awhile back, MoneyInc.com published a list of 10 facts it claimed prove you have no reason to be afraid of the stock market. The immediate concern with such a claim, of course, is that any fact that allegedly proves anything is already something to fear. As Samuel Arbesman points out in his book The Half-Life of Facts, "facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. Meat used to be good for you, then bad, then good again; now it’s a matter of opinion. We used to think the earth was the centre of the universe, it has since been demoted. We have gone from being earthbound to having humans walk on the moon." And if you thought there was another category of facts — consisting of those things we can see with our eyes, that can’t possibly be disputed or possibly change; that our Earth, for example, has only one moon — you’d be wrong. Scientists now believe the Earth has thousands of moons, some the size of a car, others the size of a washing machine, the ma...
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