Hi Ramsey, I thought I'd hook this onto your name! You'll see why.
Re Larry's post, my Dow projections are actually 8000 for Jan 1998 and 16000 for Jan 2002. Both made mid 1995, when the Dow was 4600 and CNN Moneyline was waiting for the crash! These are not simply numbers from the air. Money is being printed fast by all governments. They love their money trees! Who wouldn't?
The myriad multitudes of technological, biological and other developments and the resulting efficiency improvements are concealing what would otherwise be a very inflationary time resulting from the money printing. Economies of scale are becoming enormous with 5 billion people sharing a single person's inventive genius and R&D dollar. There are also economies of scale in production.
Oil and other resource costs are stable. Contrary to the gloom and doom Malthusian pollution nightmare crowd, oil is in abundance and will be for 50 years, even if the Chinese drive cars. If it isn't, there is a big heap of coal and gas. Even if you don't like those, the cost of coverting biomass or photovoltaic energy is not very high. If we are lucky, we are producing CO2 fast enough to prevent another ice age. Ice ages have increasingly occurred as more and more carbon has been locked up on the ocean floor, in limestone, coal and tar sands. The coming and going of ice ages is a result of carbon cycles as forests and animals spread, then die off. We have only just got rid of the last ice age 10000 years ago. But keep it quiet, or people will want a subsidy for driving a bigger car.
There is not overpopulation. There is lack of political and legal organisation and free trade is restricted. Anyway, there is going to be a population bust over the next century as the millenia old habit of 10 children per woman recedes into history. India, China and other crowded places will benefit from their big populations if their governments get off their backs and let them live.
Human endeavour and resulting value creation is increasingly from intelligence and creativity rather than finding and digging resources or killing the enemy and stealing their land and tax base. Such activities are increasingly pointless.
Military people are being reassigned to useful tasks. The Ukraine and Long March crowd will launch satellites for communication instead of launching bombs. There have always been some freaky economists and their ignorant supporters who say military and war activities are economically productive. Ignore them! I can assure you it is better to teach a child than fry their skin off with U238 fission.
A big problem is eugenics. Human evolution is more rapid than in all of history. Half the people who ever lived are alive now and will die in more ways than ever before at a wider variety of ages than ever before after reproducing in a wider range of ways than ever before. By that I mean intermingling rather than peculiar positions.
People bemoan the increasing disparity between the haves and have nots. Well, it is not because of opportunity [mostly anyway]. It is because of ability, physical design, innate personality and in a nod to the environmental influence fan club who think they can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, partly due to community values, parental skills and random life events.
Those who come over all preachy sanctimonious and say eugenics [gene selection] is bad are a pack of hypocrites. Did they marry and have children by the first person who came down the street? Hah! They performed a very careful eugenics program, selecting out all those unfit to add their DNA to the family gene pool.
But what is going to happen, is that a wider and wider range of human DNA is going to survive and reproduce. The gap between the haves and have nots is going to get bigger. But that gap was always very extreme. The King and courtiers, Chiefs and Emperors took by force the bulk of a community's value and held the people in serfdom, slavery or worse. Still today governments and their courtiers force about half a communty's value into their own and supporters' pockets.
Wealth is going to be spectacular. It already is. The poorest people in the first world have fridges, washing machines, phones, televisions, vaccinations, watches, cars and calculators [if they can use them], and supermarkets to supply their high quality food [though they probably choose sugary fatty diets] paid for by the dole. Lots of people mid century didn't have those. Nobody had calculators or televisions and the quality of the washing machines, phones etc was dodgy at best.
It is going to be a very interesting century ahead! Evolution will be rapid. The world won't look much like it does at the end of the 20th century. Politically anyway. Hey Ramsey, what'd you think of THAT!
They will ALL want CDMA Globalstar and PCS phones. The Dow will soar.
Well, that was fun.
Dow 16000, Globalstar $1000, February 2002.
Mqurice |
