Although it has been pushed aside by the daily commotions emanating from the White House, the weather continues to disturb the innards of many coastal proprietors throughout the globe. It appears that it is not only history that repeats itself.
But rivers alter their course, sometimes beating against the one side, and sometimes the other, and some times quietly keeping the channel. I do not speak of sudden inundations, the causes of which everybody understands. In Medoc, by the seashore, the Sieur d’Arsac, my brother, sees an estate he had there, buried under the sands which the sea vomits before it: where the tops of some houses are yet to be seen, and where his rents and domains are converted into pitiful barren pasturage. The inhabitants of this place affirm, that of late years the sea has driven so vehemently upon them, that they have lost above four leagues of land. These sands are her harbingers: and we now see great heaps of moving sand, that march half a league before her, and occupy the land.
Excerpt From
Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)
“The Essays of Montaigne — Complete”
“Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a book.”
The fortune of realtors does not of course depend solely upon the market value of property; nor upon whether one buys or sells. Nonetheless there is presently a whiff about the room that coastal properties are a doubtful investment. I know of no one willing to predict the future of climate change which seems to be sweeping the globe. At a minimum the weather is withdrawing people from the immediacy of the oceans, once considered the ultimate of desire and ownership. There is even careful attention being paid to riparian properties whose shorelines may also swell as the global temperatures rise.
Meanwhile the insurance companies in their inimitable way (of avoiding liability) are adamantly withdrawing from the vernacular or making their premiums indigestible. This in turn contributes to the deterioration of the popularity of coastal investment. It is naturally only a matter of time before the cultural shifts follow, thus further limiting the erstwhile attraction. Though real estate has a romantic allure, I have never viewed real estate as a calculated investment other than for the corporate landlord. There is however no doubt that the change of the current coastal real estate market will enhance and emote new and hitherto unseen investors, those wishing to profit by what they characterize as fulfillment of the adage, “It’s a strange loss that doesn’t predict another’s gain!” It will be a measured application.
The “law of infidelity,” derived from E. Aronson’s (1969) gain-loss theory of attraction, predicts that when 2 evaluators compete for the affections of an evaluatee, the one whose evaluations begin negatively but then become positive (a gain evaluator) will be liked more than a consistently positive evaluator. Experimental support for gain-loss theory has been obtained exclusively under single-evaluator conditions where the S evaluatee received evaluations from only one evaluator who either delivered a gain series or a continuously positive series of evaluations. The “law of infidelity,” however, predicts attraction in a competitive triangle, a double-evaluator situation, where the S evaluatee receives evaluations both from the gain evaluator and the positive evaluator. The present study with 70 female undergraduates confirmed the hypotheses that while a gain evaluator is liked more than a positive evaluator under single-evaluator conditions, when placed in direct competition with each other in a double-evaluator situation, the gain evaluator is no longer preferred; rather, the positive evaluator is liked significantly more. These and other findings are discussed in terms of the importance of contextual factors in the prediction of interpersonal attraction.