Professional investment may be
likened to those newspaper competitions
in which the competitors have to pick out the
six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs,
the prize being awarded
to the competitor whose choice most nearly
corresponds to the average preferences of the
competitors as a whole so that each competitor
has to pick, not those faces
which he himself considers prettiest,
but those which he thinks
likeliest to catch the fancy of the other
competitors all of whom
are looking at the problem from
the same point of view
it is not a case of choosing
those which, to the best of one's judgment,
are really the prettiest, nor even those
which average opinion genuinely
thinks the prettiest we have reached
the third degree where
we devote our intelligences
to anticipating what average
opinion expects the average
opinion to be the ritual of the scapegoating