It seems to me that "bubbles" constitute a fundamentally different
phenomena that "booms."  What Robin describes as a part of creative
destruction (surely one of the great coinages of all time) strikes me
as a boom.  That is to say, the creative mechanisms that underlie a
market economy expand real incomes by offering new opportunities.  I
would posit that a "bubble" involves a creation of purely nominal
values without actually increasing the wealth available to a society.
The housing bubble of the earlier part of this decade is a clear
bubble by this definition while the so-called Internet bubble of the
latter half of the 1990s represents more of the first phenomenon.  In
fairness, it is a non-trivial problem distinguishing between the two.

John Howard Brown
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