When listening to the experts … Most of us gain some comfort from expert advice when making a difficult decision. We all need the reassurances of an expert’s talents and experience. But we should not forget that experts can be as wrong as the rest of us. Or that it is essential to analyse their motives. As President John F Kennedy lamented after the Bay of Pigs fiasco: "How could I have been so far off base? All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts."
Classic errors abound in military, philosophical and scientific areas. In the investment field, the record is perhaps even more dismal. For example, just before the 1929 stock market crash, Yale economist Irving Fischer, the leading proponent of the quantity theory of money, said, "Stocks are now at what looks like a permanently high plateau." Jesse Livermore, after making a fortune on the crash, said in late 1929: "To my mind this situation should go no further," meaning, of course, that the market had hit bott...
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