The spreadsheet guerillas strike again.

The spreadsheet guerillas strike again.

I recognized the mistrustful face immediately as it stared back truculently from the newspaper: another hardened spreadsheet guerilla, filtering down from the mountains for another raid on another sacred cow. It's a photograph I'd seen often before but always with a different face.

What put me on his trail? The headline over a May 7, 2008 article in the Palo Alto Weekly, "School-bond opponent lays out case". "Poor financial analysis among criticisms in Wayne Martin's all-consuming campaign", says the sub-head.

Now, in Palo Alto, being against school bonds is like being against Mom, apple pie and fine German cars. Maybe it's even like being against that other pillar of the American Way as it's practiced on the mid-Peninsula: homeownership. Sure, says the spreadsheet guerilla, all that stuff looks good. But peel off the fancy packaging and run the numbers and you'll see they're lying again.

Yes, it was right out of the Spreadsheet Guerilla's Manifesto. Hmm. Could there be parallels between Martin's lonely crusade against a local school district's emotional manipulation of, and callous disinformation campaign directed toward, voters, and the lonely crusade of Sage, America's Number One Bubble Blogger, against the real estate industry's emotional manipulation of, and callous disinformation campaign directed toward, homebuyers? Had yet another "gadfly", girded only with spreadsheets, plenty o' pluck and maybe a little hubris (and maybe plenty o' hubris) galloped headlong into the fray? Let's just see about that.

"All-consuming campaign" might be a tip-off. So would "getting up at 3 a.m. and going to bed at 10 p.m. for weeks", the kind of "non-stop dedication" it takes for Martin or anyone to single-handedly buck a trend. Could "obsession" be another word? The kind of obsession that might be needed to keep America's Number One Bubble Blog America's Number One Bubble Blog five years running while American's Number One Bubble Blogger still keeps his day job?

And is it just coincidence that both Martin and Sage hail from Silicon Valley? I think not. Silicon Valley's all-consuming obsession: obsession.

According to the Weekly, Martin has "paused" (welcome to Silicon Valley!) his job as a systems analyst to build a Web site "packed with graphs, charts and accusations". This tells us that Martin is thorough; apparently he's throwing everything at this bond measure except the kitchen sink. A smorgasbord of objections with something for every segment of the disaffected. By the way, I count forty-nine points in Sage's Manifesto.

This also tells us Martin is analytical. He loves numbers. He loves numbers because numbers tell us only truth, plain truth, simple truth, freeing truth. But of course, numbers don't speak truth by themselves. The beggars need someone like Martin (or Sage) to put words in their little mouths.

Which brings us to revelation number two: neither Martin nor Sage have the background normally considered requisite to knowing what they're talking about on the subject they obsess about. Martin is a systems analyst, not a financial analyst. Sage is a computer engineer whose sole experience in the real estate marketplace apparently consists of one unsuccessful offer eight years ago. But that's what makes this Information Age so empowering: now anyone can figure out everything about everything. In his spare bedroom or in his cubicle, in his spare time. As Sage says, "It's simple".

Oh yes it is. Life is always simple. For some people.

Playing David in a permanent battle against Goliath isn't anything new for either Martin or Sage. This is Martin's third anti-bond campaign. Before Sage became American's Number One Bubble Blogger, he alerted us, online and in letters to the editor, to the perfidies of Microsoft, Black & Decker and Wells Fargo, and to miscreants who use lighter fluid to start their barbeques.

Both Martin and Sage could be described as Alert Citizens.

So what's Martin's objection to this particular school bond measure? "A main weakness [according to Martin]", says the Weekly, "is its dependence on ever-increasing property values". Here's where the parallels between Martin and Sage get positively eerie, because Martin's language and thinking could be taken directly from Sage's blogging. By Martin's calculations, "a home worth $1.7 million today [the average Palo Alto sales price] would theoretically jump in value to $16 million in 40 years" using an average of the growth projections in home prices used by the school district. But Martin sees the fallacy in this. "No one would pay that price...half of Palo Alto are grody little Eichlers that are over 50 years old, many of which ought to be knocked down, they're in such poor shape". So Palo Alto home prices "will likely plateau rather than rising".

Let's hit pause a moment to review this bit of homespun, intuitive "common sense". Because we've run across a fascinating instance of the cross-currents in spreadsheet-guerilla thinking: here Martin, knowingly or not, quotes bubble dogma!

First, note the fondness for the flat and dismissive assertion. "No one...ought to...knocked down...half of...grody little...poor shape". Strong opinion promoting itself to pure science.

And home prices must have an artificial upper limit because, well, because "no one" will pay those prices—or is it just Martin and Sage who won't pay those prices, so naturally "no one" will pay those prices? Another technique and sentiment you'll often find on Sage's blog.

Then there's the idea that Sage or Martin or anyone knows—absolutely positively knows—what the real estate market will look like in forty years. And you bet it won't be pretty.

Of course, if anyone suggested forty years ago that a "grody little Eichler" just purchased new for $15k would one day sell for $1.7M, he'd be dismissed as either a crank or a hopeless optimist. Common sense plainly said this was impossible. Because "no one" etc.

Will these homes continue to gain value indefinitely at their current rate? Is there no limit to their value? When you consider how much of the market value of the "grody little Eichler" is in the land it sits on—and that land doesn't wear out, or become functionally obsolete—and that forty years from now this area will still have its charms, including, most likely, nationally-recognized public schools (unless Martin can pound some sense into gullible clueless homebuyers, sorry, I mean voters)—then, yes, why not? Why should there be a limit? Is there any limit to inflation? Are they building more land in Palo Alto?

Then also consider that many a "grody little Eichler" will meet precisely the fate Martin predicts: it'll be knocked down. Leaving a ghost town filled with vacant lots, right? No, leaving a city filled with larger, newer homes that have a higher market value and, when they sell, a higher assessed value. And higher assessed values is what the bond measure is predicated on.

Like Sage, Martin is fond of drawing lines in the sand that real life can cross only at its peril. With Sage, it's "home prices can be no more than X". With Martin, it's "ten years is the longest time frame in which one can make reasonable guesses about economic reality". Sure it's not nine years, Martin? Maybe it's eleven.

But you know what? Martin might be right! Because it's entirely possible that in ten years Palo Alto will have outlawed private property rights and Palo Altans will all be working on Soviet-style collectives. That is, if a giant meteor doesn't flatten the city, in which case Palo Altans will be living in caves. And since it's Palo Alto, those caves will be selling for $1.7M.

And since the future is uncertain, you don't have to plan for it. Sage, with his "Renting is temporary, but so is life", might well endorse this kind of tomorrow-will-take-care-of-itself thinking. Maybe we should all plan our lives in rolling ten-year increments, as if we had only ten years from today to live.

Martin sums up his case in classic bubble-speak: "I'm not trying to be a wack-job here, but [my argument] is all hard-and-fast economics, which is not being practiced by the other side". Or as Sage says, "It's just simple math anyone can do". But do the supposedly simple and hard-headed answers these spreadsheet guerillas give us come from a thorough grounding in the subject? Or are they just the "common sense" of the man in the street with a burr up his butt, drawing upon and contributing to that eternal wellspring of naïveté and misinformation called "collective wisdom"?

The line between gadfly and crank is a fine one. Martin sees himself as "gadfly, goading people into thinking more deeply about the issues". (I've noticed that it's always the other side that needs to be "thinking more deeply".) Sage will tell you he's shedding much-needed light on the real estate industry's various conspiracies and on homeownership itself, that snare and delusion to the unwary. All very public-spirited, of course.

But let me get this straight. Blundering into a complex subject and getting it wrong—not just having an alternative opinion on the subject, but getting it flat out wrong because it's way outside your field of expertise—somehow does the public a favor?

What's served here, the public good or a boundless ego?