'Paul Hawken's "The Next Economy" published 1983' ... that's quite a little book isn't it, haven't picked it up for years but just now dusted it off .... he was so right-on on so many things, definitely helped me to clear my head after getting caught with too much real estate and too little cash when the interest rates went through the roof in '81 ... he was right about the new economy, information over mass, services over hard goods, etc
Interesting worthwhile book, and i ignored it completely ... which was the rational move imho, considering the situation - by that time, late '83 or early '84 when i read it, the whole old-economy business of mass goods in which i was involved had crashed quite completely, logs were selling for about a third of their 1980 price, heavy equipment was going for nothing, you couldn't give land away if you put a cherry on top .... so finding myself lucky enough to have a small contract providing income, i bought land, nothing down and just made the payments on an agreement for sale, didn't make them all that regularly either, didn't have the money at more than a few month-ends ... but, hung onto it, and inside of six years the timber on the land had grown some, the price of logs had doubled, and all of a sudden people were wanting hobby-farm acreage again ... it worked out, really well, and return on original capital from its sum of around zero was quite infinite -g- .... along the way, got really lucky on a gold stock not two years after reading Hawken's book
People are always going to want wood, and they're always going to want gold, imho, and the markets in wood and gold will go up and down and up and down ad infinitum ... which takes nothing away from H's thoughts, yes i'd recommend his book to anybody |
