Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Chapter 3. The Transit of Venus

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

In Chapter 1, we attempted only to show that the world improvers were nitwits. It was light work, we admit, but it had to be done. In this chapter, our burden is equally modest: to show what the world improver has to work with—the soft mush and muscle that is man as he actually is.

We recall the week of June 5, 2004. It was a good one in which to die; you would have been in such good company. Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, Robert Kephart …

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the nation's old friend; Robert Wilson Kephart was ours. Bob had waged war against cancer for two years. Even when all hope of victory seemed lost—he could not even hope for a draw—he refused to surrender. If God were going to take him, He'd have to fight for him. But the fight was rigged; Bob had no chance.

That week, too, Venus made a rare promenade directly between the Earth and the Sun—a transit of Venus, astrologers call it.

Why did it matter, we asked a friend.

“Serotonin” was her answer.

“It's why the transit of Venus makes a difference to stock prices,” said the editor of London's MoneyWeek magazine, our colleague, Merryn Somerset‐Webb.

“It's a proven fact,” she went on, “that the sun, the moon, and other heavenly bodies affect the amount of serotonin in your brain. Serotonin affects your mood. That's why astrology really ...