Can you elaborate more? I understand that they didn’t invent memetic desire (no one did it’s a innate human behavior from girard pov) but don’t understand the second portion of your comment
Until you lose most of your money in a bubble, you don't really get bubbles - they seem like something that only happens to other dumb people, not to you.
The most obvious, recent, and one of the biggest being the subprime housing bubble in the US.
Everyone who wasn't buying a house looked like a moron for 3 years as prices were going up >10% per year (on 33:1 leverage, if not near infinite leverage - a lot of these were no money down).
The average family was making more money in appreciation on their house than working their jobs.
> This paper shows that Newton did not just taste of the Bubble's madness, but drank deeply of it. His losses, even by conservative accounting, almost surely exceeded £10 000, and plausible methods easily produce values that exceed the £20 000 figure that family lore claimed, and which is frequently cited today. By comparison with typical earnings, and making allowances for a very different society and economy, £20 000 in 1720 might be comparable to £20 million, $20 million, or euro 20 million today.9 However, before the Bubble, in the 1710s, Newton's investments appear to have been those of a careful and shrewd person, and to have been very successful. Newton died rich, with an estate valued at about £30 000, but that is primarily because he was already rich on the eve of the Bubble.
Not GP, but I think what they mean is that most of gen Z has not yet seen a serious downturn with their own eyes and with their own money in the market. On one hand they have older generations telling them to watch out and that bubbles never last, but on the other hand all their own experience has ever told them is that stocks pretty much only go up and that meme stocks go up way more than "boring" companies with allegedly better fundamentals. It is a very human instinct for these gen-Z investors to trust their own observations much more than the advice they get from other people.
The argument is that eventually a crisis will come again (as it has done repeatedly every 10-20 years for centuries) and then the boring companies with big buffers and lack of risky behavior will be much better positioned to weather the storm, while many of loss-making companies in declining industries (yet with very high share prices due to meme stock status) will suffer more and possibly go bankrupt. That is the "weighing" part of the stock market boom/bust cycle as opposed to the "voting" part of the stock market that is currently exemplified by the stonks investing community.
