"People tend to overestimate what they can achieve in the short term and underestimate what they can achieve in the long term"
I'm sure many authors have used this quote in a variety of contexts. It is a recurring theme in the stock market, manifesting itself as a variety of boom and bust cycles. The roaring 20s can be described as an overestimation in the short term of industrial and financial service supply which corrected during the 30s. The trend did resume of course, and the industrial revolution of the United States was the long term result. The dot-com boom and bust was the short term overestimation of the evolution of information technology which may have fully corrected.
