I found this anecdote to be most amusing:
One amusing part of the afternoon session was a story Dr. Shiller related about a localized Los Angeles housing bubble in 1885. In describing the mentality in 1885 Los Angeles, he said that people thought “Los Angeles is special!” He also quoted from an article in the LA Times which was published during the aftermath of the collapse in 1886:
“We Californians have learned something. And that is that home prices can’t just go up forever—they have to be supported by something. Never again will Californians make this mistake.”
Hey, Californians didn’t completely forget it for more than a century. That’s incredibly impressive by most standards, especially considering that Americans have embraced Keynesian interventionism only 79 years after it turned a big depression into a Great one.