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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Possibly, the defining aspect of an investment bubble is the popping.

But the term bubble, at least when used by the media, also seems to have a connotation of bursting in the near future. If someone told me tech was in a bubble, but the pop wouldn't be for another century, I would not define it as a bubble. Even if the future pop was enormous.

What if the century long bubble concluded with a pop that resulted in total economic collapse? I'm not suggesting that is likely, just that the defining characteristic of a bubble seems to be the magnitude of the fallout after the pop, not the span of time leading up to the pop.

Investors, especially those of public companies, are known to be short sighted. Typical investors would never call it a "bubble" if they felt the pop wasn't for another decade, let alone a century.

Perhaps both the magnitude and the time leading up to it are of equal importance.

It's probably better to think of bubbles as the accumulation of unsustainable behavior.

Obviously we aren't able to predict a few months into the future, let alone a hundred years, so it's hard to definitively say whether current behavior is sustainable for a hundred years or not.

It's much more reasonable/believable to say that current behavior is unsustainable for 1, 5, or 10 years.

Which brings up the interesting problem that, in theory, we can never be sure it is or is not a bubble unless we look at the behavior in the limit as t -> infinity. One problem with gauging things in the universe (or in the economic sense, the fundamentals in order to value something) is that we will likely never have the tools to do it in the "real" sense.

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