Stein was the formulator of "Herbert Stein's Law," which he expressed as "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop," by which he meant that if a trend (balance of payments deficits in his example) cannot go on forever, there is no need for action or a program to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord. It is often rephrased as: "Trends that can't continue, won't."
The Glenn Reynolds paraphrase: "If something can’t go on forever, it won’t."
Five Delectable Examples of "Steins Law" - John Mauldin
Dr. Woody Brock:
The most basic statement of Stein's Law says: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop". More specifically, the late Herb Stein stressed that, when a trend cannot go on, it always stops--even when nothing is done about it. This yardstick of common sense is particularly apposite today, as we see in the following five examples of trends whose time has come and gone.
1. Mean Reversion in US Wealth Growth: A March 7 front page headline of the Financial Times proclaimed, "Fed Data Alarms Markets - Wealth of US Households Contracts". We have written about "mean reversion in national wealth growth" for the past five years, and explained why it would soon have to occur. In this regard, one of the most fundamental of all theorems in economics tells us that national wealth must (and empirically does) grow over the long run at the rate of GDP growth.
Well, wealth reversion has now arrived, and will be with us for far longer than most anyone expects. First, wealth has already contracted by $500 billion in 2007. Second, wealth contraction will continue to occur until mid-2009 when house prices reach their trough. And third, wealth growth will probably be sluggish up to and beyond 2020, running at about 3%. One reason why is that most baby boomers have their money in their houses--not in traditional defined benefit pension plans. Accordingly, the only way they will be able to retire in the style they expect is to sell their houses to one another. Next joke.
How remarkably this new 2.5% wealth growth regime of 2007-2020 will differ from the previous regime of 1981-2006! During that period, US net worth soared from $10 trillion to $57 trillion--an arithmetic average growth rate of 18% and a compound annual growth rate of 7.2%. For readers who doubt what we are arguing, note that the average growth of wealth across the two regimes being analyzed compounds at exactly 5.5%. This is precisely the long-run growth of nominal GDP. And all the Golden Rule Theorems in Growth Theory require that wealth growth and GDP growth converge to the same growth rate in the long-run.
This will fundamentally change both American politics and daily life. In particular, it will be the final nail in the coffin of hopes of early retirement for most baby-boomers. In short, "wealth reversion" is finally coming home to roost. What cannot go on does not go on.
Europe Confronts Stein’s Law - Desmond Lachman
The late Herb Stein was fond of observing that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. This aphorism appears particularly apt for the current Eurozone. It seems unreasonable to expect that voters in the Eurozone’s north, and especially in Germany, will indefinitely acquiesce to transferring large amounts of bailout money to the Eurozone’s south in an effort to keep those countries afloat. And it seems even more unreasonable to expect voters in the south to indefinitely endure the severe economic and social pain associated with continued euro membership and the austerity measures attached to the financing they receive from the north.
