Jane Galt looks at the stock market bubble of the late ’90s and why so many supposedly bright folks lost their nest eggs. She proposes, in essence, that some nifty (in some applications) evolutionary programming overpowered our supposed rationality:

Seriously, think about the way evolution has programmed us to learn.
We are, by nature, fearful beings. But fear will only get you so far in this imperfect world, and so nature has also equipped many of us with a modicum of courage and a taste for novelty. Those people try new things. If disaster doesn’t ensue, they try them again. If that works out, they do it a third time. Each time they lose a little more fear . . . and a few more, slightly less courageous people are encouraged to try it, having seen it work for the “thought leaders”. After the eighth or twentieth repetition, the entire tribe is eating pterodactyl steak or riding railroads or investing in the stockmarket.
We are programmed to lose a little more fear every time we are successful — to worry less about the risks. It’s a heuristic that allows pre-rational animals to function pretty well in a universe of many unknowns.
But it has its costs. And I’d argue that speculative bubbles are one of them.

There is a lot more so head on over and check it out.
Rip Rowan thinks this article is interesting but not quite on the mark:

The problem with Galt’s analysis is this: stock market bubbles are not irrational. They are perfectly rational responses to perfectly rational conditions.
The rational condition is easy to understand: new, discontinuous technologies (for example, the advent of the Internet and new biotechnology possibilities opened up by the unraveling of the human genome) created an environment in which the market was forced to react to possibly revolutionary changes in the business environment with extremely poor information on the short- and long-term impacts of those technologies.

Hmmmm, pretty hard to make rational decisions with ‘extremely poor information.’ While the bubble itself may have been a rational response I think Jane’s argument that “investors in the late 1990’s had completely slipped their cams” is pretty solid.
There are some additional comments on the article here, here and here.

This guy was fired for cause and will apparently still make out like a bandit:

Boeing says neither ousted executive will receive severance pay beyond options and share grants that have already vested. Sears, who began working for Boeing’s McDonnell Douglas unit in 1969, will receive a pension at age 65 valued at between $672,000 and $840,000 a year, according to a company filing.

Too bad he will have to wait 9 years to start skimming this cream.
NB: I’d love to retire with that kind of income but my 401k won’t even have an asset value equal to one years worth of this dude’s take home.