Bitcoin Is A “Social Movement,” Says Nobel Prize Winner Robert Shiller
Robert Shiller, an American Nobel Laureate and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, said bitcoin is a social movement whose popularity splits along geographic lines in the United States.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Shiller said that bitcoin’s popularity varies based on geography and is not reducible to “a rational response to new information.”
“It’s generational and geographic also, the East Coast is less into it than the West Coast,” Shiller said. “Sillicon valley is really into it…this to me shows that this is not a rational response to new info.”
Shiller was asked if he agrees with the comparison between bitcoin and the 17th century tulip bubble in the Netherlands that some bitcoin naysayers have made, the Nobel Prize winner noted that tulips still carry value and there are expensive tulips.
“Bitcoin is a social movement,” said Shiller. “It’s an epidemic of enthusiasm. It is a speculative bubble. That doesn’t mean that it will go to zero. We had a bubble in bitcoin in 2013 and it looked like it was done – it fell from 1000 to 200, but look it comes back.”
Shiller also argued that crypto innovations are drawing disproportionate attention, largely due to “investor excitement” at “getting rich quick.”
“Do you know what’s going on inside your laptop? There are millions of interesting stories about brilliant engineering devices… but we don’t hear about them,” said Shiller. “That’s because they’re not part of a bubble.”
While he has criticized bitcoin, Shiller said that he likes the innovative spirit and excitement that the cryptocurrency has created. He suggested that bitcoin’s cachet as a “remarkable social phenomenon” leaves ample room for its future resilience.
