The geminating idea is: Dawkins is just wrong. He used to go around constantly dunking on TRADITIONAL religion about how it was a virus, and he was just... wrong.
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Tiny fast evolving things (like cults) are sources of novelty, and larger slower things (like 1000 year old civilizations with old co-evolved religions) must tame them, or be devoured. Novel horizontal culture is often pretty bad.
Is it maybe that Dawkins is not just wrong with his idea that religion is the virus. But that his preaching of rational atheism is the Virus. Looking at the birthrates of the atheist part of the society it seems like the virus is killing its host.
Comparing the crashes before and after the end of the bretton woods agreement 1971 should not be done. Those are to separate currencies, they had still the same name "USD" but the attributes changed dramatically and this gave the FED much more tools during market crashes.
E.g. its simpler to reflate the stock prices if the FED just issues trillions of $ and ignores CPI and Asset price inflation. That was not so easy in currency system that was Gold backed.
This site gathers some of the economic data that got skewed after the currency system change.
Thats not fair to mention EMH here, the stock price rally of the last couple months had not much todo with EMH. Unless you include Central Bank adhoc overnight actions into the EMH theory. If the FED would not have stepped in with unprecedented rescue plans we would have a very different SP500 valuation today.
Efficient markets work mostly only in theory. Traders and Investors that find spots to exploit market inefficiencies hold them as secretive as possible. Those market inefficient often also don't allow high volumes of money. So its often closed private funds that truly discover and use such spots for years.
Open Investment funds often try to sell exactly this Idea, but they are more sales people that money managers.
Another problem arises if the smart money is too small to make a difference. E.g. in January many smart investors started to play the Covid-19 Spot. Longing companies like Zoom and shorting SP500. Zoom Stock went up immediately because that handful of smart money was enough to move the price. But the SP500 continued to make new All time highs since the hand full of smart investor money was laughable against the mass of auto invest strategies into the SP500.
Another distinction is that in Science participants go a long way to explain to the other party why their theory is superior, there is a direct incentive of recognition and contributing to the field. In Investing the truly smart money is doing the opposite they try to stay as secretive as possible. The public discussions about economics by Traders, Investors and Economist we often witness are either pure marketing for their fund(Traders/Investors). Handwaving reasoning (Economists).
This kind of response to my post is part of how that virus works. It's ok to claim religion is a virus. But it's not ok to claim atheism is a virus.
Im not trying to attack anyone here.
Thats just my observation.