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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (40128)	3/9/2001 12:37:27 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

I do have a problem with mining a pattern and applying it to the present without recognizing that there are many, many differences in the context and forces operating now. I'd have a problem with that also. If nothing else, the technology context is massively different and this has major impacts on virtually all aspects of the situation. If you carefully analyze the immigration adjusted demographic profile from say 1910 to 1930, there is a surprisingly tight correlation between that profile and the economy. One could have argued in 1972 that no projection of a secular bear should be made because the technology context is massively different and this has major impacts on virtually all aspects of the situation. But the bear came anyway. Now maybe that was just a coincidence, but I have a physical scientist's nervousness about coincidences. When I see a very similar scenario played out in Japan, even with the wide cultural and economic structural differences, I start to considering a "working hypothesis". In modern industrial societies, one can formulate a producing/consuming profile for the members of that society. Such a profile peaks in middle age. So one has to ask oneself - is it reasonable to assume that when there is an abundance of such people, the economy will "hum"? And will the dearth of such people in a society cause the economy to stall? Moreover, if the bulge and trough in the demographic cohorts is sufficiently large, will it dominate irrespective of any set of technological innovations? I'm not claiming to have the answers to these questions. Rather, I'm saying there is a sufficient correlation between demographics and economic activity to warrant a consideration of these questions. Again JMO. lurqer