Barry Ritholtz, television commentator and Big Picture blogger, replies in the Comments, continuing our discussion on whether or not "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:"

We live in very different worlds.

Mine is data and numbers and statistics and facts. In the investment world, by how well your theories of what is really going translates into an investable theme; you are judged by performance, not rhetoric.

Your world is all soft theory and suppositions and squishy reasoning and hard-to-prove causation. In my world, it would be described as "not actionable in the investment realm."

I am happy to visit, but the commute is a bitch.

Funny, though, but I've presented 95%+ plus of the "data and numbers and statistics and facts" in this discussion. Barry had only one set of numbers, and when I pointed out how they were too narrowly specified and we're generally irrelevant, well, he had shot his wad in the data department and was forced first to make concessions, then to go back to this kind of innumerate bluster.

By the way, Barry, did your "investment world" do a really bang-up job of assessing the value of all those mortgages issued in, say, Riverside-San Bernardino in 2005? (Numbers that were readily downloadable from the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database by October 2006, well before the crash?) Maybe, just maybe, your peers were missing a piece of the puzzle intellectually?