Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

The End of Growth: weekend extra

While talking about The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg with a friend of mine, my friend brought up two important points. One I’d like to discuss today, the other one tomorrow.

For today’s topic, we discussed how it seems a shame that companies have to grow to survive. Everything around a company is always growing, so if a company isn’t itself growing them in relative terms it’s shrinking. Wouldn’t it be better if companies didn’t have to laser-focus on growth? And what does that means for the economy as a whole, that the companies that make it are focused on growth at the expense of all else?

This topic made me remember the “Red Queen Hypothesis” in biology. In Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” This gave its name to a hypothesis in biology that species must be constantly evolving and proliferating or else they go extinct. In much the same way that companies area always competing, so to are species always competing, and the competitor that cannot go forward will go extinct. I’d idly curious if anyone has adapted the Red Queen hypothesis to economics, is this biological law really part of a broader law on competition?

But more to it than that, I think the constant strive for growth is a very human feeling to have. We are all ruled by emotions of wanting more or at least of not wanting to lose what we already have. That in turn forces us to work every day to make the money we need to keep what we’ve got and get what we want. I know a lot of people my age would love to be able to get a better job to buy a house and start a family, and that requires striving and working towards that goal. And I know a lot of our parents already have a house, maybe even a fully-paid for house in a nice location with a large 401k. Many of our parents could probably sell their house and car, buy a small cottage in the middle of nowhere, and live on baked beans and rice for the rest of their life using only a small fraction of their wealth every year. It wouldn’t be a glamorous life, but commuting once a week into town for beans is surely easier that commuting every day to work? But no one does (or at least very few do) because they’d like to keep their lifestyle and even improve it with a vacation or a cruise every now and then.

Companies are run by people and those people have the same emotions we all do, they want to get what they want and keep what they’ve got. Not just the managers and the C-suite but the investors and the workers as well. The tech workers at Amazon want to move up in the hierarchy or at least get a good recommendation for their work on a stellar project so they can move to some better job. Failing that they’d really hope Amazon stays profitable so they don’t get laid off. The investors in Amazon want their investment to grow or at least not shrink too much, as they’re counting on it to maintain their lifestyle once they retire. Jeff Bezos would probably like to own a Mars colony or at least not have to sell the Washington Post. They all want more and so they all push the company in their own ways to do more.

I think it’s a far fear to have that companies seem focused solely on growth at the expense of all else, because we can all see that many of them will hit an unavoidable wall and stop growing. And it leads to the question of what happens when a company stops growing, when they hit a wall, what happens? I think all companies do eventually find themselves hitting a wall they can’t surpass due to cultural or technological reasons (Amazon and Facebook/Meta may be hitting it now).  But it’s important to realize there are always new companies ready to take their place.  New companies can always be formed using new technology, and they in turn can use resources more efficiently and effectively, leading to higher and higher growth.  Those companies mature, hit a wall, and someone new comes to take their place. 

Just look at Tesla or a 2022 Toyota Corolla.  70 years ago it took a massive amount of oil (10 miles to the gallon!) to drive cross-country, and the car you sat in was made required a ton of man-hours to build and wasn’t even all that safe.  Today I can get from here to Minneapolis using no oil at all (I can even charge as solar powered charging stations), and the car was made mostly by machines and not men, and it’s got a huge number of safety features making me much more likely to make it to my destination.  In real economic terms the car I drive today is worth way more than the cars driven 70 years ago, even the cars driven 10 years ago, and continued advances in technology show no signs of slowing. 

Even if exactly the same number of cars were made today as were made 70 years ago, we would say there’s been economic growth as those cars are more efficient, safer, and cheaper to build in terms of man-hours.  The supply of cars has not been constant however and has in fact grown, the labor freed up from people who used to work in a Ford factory has been refocused into healthcare and IT, leading to advances there.

That economic growth is good for all of us, and it came about because some new companies were laser focused on growth. Toyota and Tesla have improved the cars we use in both safety and utility, and someday a new company may come to knock them off their perch. That new company will continue to grow by providing us with better products than what came before, and each new company is focused on growth because, again, the people running these companies are all humans with the very human desire of wanting more. I don’t think you can end the desire for growth without ending humans

The End of Growth part 3: Peak Oil

I’m still going through The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg. His central thesis is that in 2011 the world economy completely changed and we can expect no real economic growth happening after that year. He furthermore discusses Peak Oil and how it’s the key to understanding the end of growth. Here’s his first prognostication on oil:

The US had been the world’s primary oil producer, but by 1971 its oil production peaked and began to decline

This was a very defensible position in 2011. Not so today when we’ve seen US oil production skyrocket once again and far outstrip the highs of 1971. Even in the absolute depths of the Coronavirus pandemic, when oil prices briefly dipped below zero dollars and producers had to pay to get excess oil shipped out, oil production was higher than the “peak” of 1971.

An aside: how can oil prices dip below zero but oil wells still afford to pump? Well the coronavirus pandemic was temporary, we all knew it was temporary, and oil wells kept pumping in expectation of the good times just around the corner. Those good times have indeed come to pass, and the price of oil has rocketed back up again along with new production to feed this demand. The price was below zero, but that doesn’t mean you could get oil for “free,” it was only below zero if you showed up to an oil well with the proper equipment and container vehicles to ship oil off the property.

Anyway, Richard Heinberg goes on to sketch out the Peak Oil scenario that he believed in 2011 was an inevitable future. I don’t want to just quote his book verbatim but I’ll summarize it here:

  • Around the year 2010 oil production inevitably stagnates, leading to oil prices skyrocketing. This causes an economic crash
  • The economic crash leads to economic contraction, meaning oil demand slackens and oil prices fall
  • Oil prices falling means demand can pick back up
  • …but then oil prices also go up, leading to yet another economic crash
  • We repeat theses steps ad infinitum, each boom/bust cycle happening quicker and quicker and causing more and more social chaos
  • No force is able to stop this cycle, price volatility precludes oil investment which means supply remains constricted

He goes on further to state that this scenario isn’t actually a prediction of the future, it’s a description of the past

  • This Peak Oil cataclysm began in 2008, led in part to the Financial Crisis, and continues to the present time (2011 when Heinberg wrote his book)

This is all very interesting, especially the key feature of his theory that new supply will never be be able to be produced in quantities that will keep up with demand. He claims that rising and falling prices will ensure that there is too much volatility to make the investment sound, and that in part is his theory for why this cycle can’t be escaped with oil. It’s an elegant theory, but it’s a theory that’s been proven false since he wrote it, oil supply did increase and volatility wasn’t an impassible barrier for new production.

Even without the benefit of hindsight it would be unreasonable to believe his theory in the first place as it assumes no one has any sort of agency during this crisis, everyone can only watch helplessly as the price of oil rockets up and down. Let’s discuss the story of Joseph in the bible for a second: The Pharaoh foresaw that 7 years of good harvests would be followed by 7 years of famine and asked Joseph what he could do to prevent calamity. Joseph explained to him the simple principle of storage and rationing: store food during the good times and hand it out during the bad. Instead of a boom/bust cycle leading to massive death and destruction, Egypt under the Pharaoh and Joseph had a smoothed-out supply allowing them to weather the storm and continue living and farming. I bring this up not as a bible lesson but to explain that we have known for thousands of years how to prevent the exact cycle described by Heinberg’s theory from occurring. If we can predict something like this then we can prevent it using even the simplest of economic activities such as storing and rationing.

The United States even has an entire system dedicated storing and rationing oil: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. When prices are low, the US buys oil and fills the reserve, which keeps the price high and encourages producers to keep producing and investing. When prices are high (such as 2022), we empty the reserve, selling the oil and alleviating the worst effects of the shortage. And the US government isn’t the only one engaged in this, from OPEC to Exxon-Mobile, nearly every oil-producing entity has or pays for a way to store oil during the glut and sell it during the dearth, to mothball unneeded production but then turn it back on when prices spike. The Peak oil cycle never happened, Heinberg theorized that oil supply would stay relatively constant as the volatility precluded investment but instead the volatility was mostly smoothed out by both market and government forces and investment (and production) have continued to rise.

As I said, the cycle sketched out by Heinberg isn’t just theoretically unsound it was disproven by history. He suspected that low oil prices would allow economic growth, leading to high oil prices and another crash. But while oil prices did dip not long after his book came out, they dipped because of sky-high supply from the US and OPEC not contracted demand due to an economic crash. Let me state that again: falling demand did not cause oil prices to crash, rising supply did, which runs completely contrary to Heinberg’s Peak Oil theory. Oil investment has continued and oil production has increased, the US currently produces around 12 million barrels of oil a day, more than any time in the 1970s and more than double as much as was produced when Heinberg’s book was published. I wonder what he would think about that.

Double post: does anyone remember The Oil Drum?

I’m doubling posting today because I have a separate thought that I want to get out. Does anyone remember the site “The Oil Drum“? In my poking around the Peak Oil mediasphere, I found a few references to it. It seems that during its existence from mid 2000s into 2013, it was a non-profit project spreading the Good Word of Peak Oil and doing a lot of research on that subject as well.

Here’s a chart they show to prove that Peak Oil is happening and that 2008 is definitely the peak. The figure was produced in 2008, and the commentary reads:

Comment: The highest estimate in [this figure] is from the US Energy Information Administration. It is based primarily on demand, under the assumption that OPEC will always have additional oil available, if needed.

The next highest forecast is from the June 2008 newsletter of the Association for the Study Peak Oil and Gas-Ireland, prepared by Colin Campbell. This is a very well-known forecast. A link to it can be found here. It forecasts a peak in 2008, with a fairly slow decline after 2008.

The next highest forecast is that of Tony Eriksen (“Ace”) of The Oil Drum staff. A link to his forecast can be found here. In this forecast, Ace considers the various Megaprojects, and when they are expected to go on line. He also considers expected decline rates on existing fields. He believes that we are on a plateau now that may last a few years. After that production will decline.

The remaining estimate is by Matt Simmons. In this interview, he mentions that he expects crude oil (not “total liquids”) to drop to 65 million barrels a day by 2013. I have attempted to translate this comment into an equivalent projection, on a total liquids basis. It ends up being just a bit below Ace’s projection.

It seems like for the year 2019 (the year before COVID sent the economy haywire), the Oil Drum experts predicted about 60 million barrels per day of oil production. ASPO was more bullish at 70 million barrels per day. Meanwhile the US Energy Information Administration gave a much higher prediction, but the Oil Drum seems to claim that US EIA was making numbers out of thin air in its mistaken belief that oil production would be driven solely by demand. Yet US EIA’s prediction of 100 million barrels per day was just a hair above the real number of 95 million barrels per day. Maybe the US EIA (an agency withing the Department of Energy) actually does do research and knew a bit more in 2008 than folks at The Oil Drum.

The End of Growth part 2: growth didn’t begin with oil and coal

I’m continuing to read The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg. His book claims that, from his vantage point in 2011, economic growth is no longer possible and that any future growth is a myth propped up by financial trickery. Part of his thesis rests on the idea that economic growth as we know it only came about through continued advancements in hydrocarbon extraction. Oil, coal, and natural gas, these are all commodities of incredibly high energy density but incredibly low transportation costs: burning them is easy and liberates energy. This energy then powers economic growth. He blithely asserts that prior to the discovery and utilization of these hydrocarbons economic growth basically didn’t exist, and when we have used up the last of these hydrocarbons it will cease once again. It’s that first bit I’d like to take issue with today.

Economic growth didn’t start with coal. Mr Heinberg seems to have a very Eurocentric and modern-centric view of history, ascribing 100% of all economic growth to the time after the industrial revolution. It’s true that in millennia past, a nation’s power lay mostly in its raw population total. That’s because 90%+ of all people were usually subsistence farmers, and mobilizing their labor for war or public buildings was how most nations used their power. But growth still occurred before the industrial revolution, and we see evidence of it through history.

For example: technology is growth. If every single year an average person can do more and more using less and less, isn’t that a case of economic growth? Wouldn’t we measure that as an increase in GDP? And technology has been progressing for every millennium of human history, not just the last few centuries. Take Italy in the 16th century and compare it to Roman Latium from the 1st century, a middle class urban Italian could enjoy luxuries the likes of which a senator or emperor could only dream of. Take books for example, in Latium it would have taken a team of scribes several weeks or months to copy by hand all of Julius Caesar’s Bello Gallico, meaning that copies were limited and had to be fiercely protected. Meanwhile an Italian with a printing press could print off a few hundred copies all by himself, selling them and other books out to middle class folk and letting middle class libraries expand to point that people could spend their entire lives just reading (and some folks did just that). In a very real sense we would say that the printing press led to a growth in the Italian economy, because more books could be made with less labor. This freed up labor to do other things, those former scribes could now go on to be writers themselves, or inventors or even go back to the field as farmhands.

If you took the GDP per capita of Roman Latium and compared it to the GDP per capita of 16th Century Florence, you’d find a hell of a lot more stuff being produced per person per year. The printing press and technological innovations like it had allowed the Italian economy to grow in ways that didn’t require extracting more resources out of the ground, and the same holds true in our economy today.

So even if the very last drop of oil or nugget of coal is extracted from our earth, why would we ever believe that growth would stop right there? Oil, coal and gas are just useful stores of energy, there are other ways to store and transport energy that we could use, and further technology that we can develop to grow our economy. A cheap, fast, and accurate 3D printer using solar power and bioplastic would lead to considerable economic growth, and there’s no reason to think its invention would be impossible in a world without oil. So while it may be true that oil is a finite resource, that truth bears no relation to truths about economic growth. Growth has never required oil, even today solar and wind power are becoming greater and greater proportions of our national electric grid, and when we finally transition away from oil growth will not stop, just as the Italians didn’t need oil to start their growth in the 16th century.

The end of growth?

I’m doing that thing again where I read old books just to dunk on the authors. This time it’s “The End of Growth” by Richard Heinberg. Written in 2011, here’s how it starts:

The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we know it is over and done with

Heinberg goes on to say that although countries may still experience a few quarters or even a whole year of growth,

the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consuption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on

Not only that, but Heinberg goes further in decreeing that this is true for the entire world, not just any one nation. Any national growth in one nation (which will necessarily be very small, as stated above) will be balanced out by a reduction in the size of the other economies of the world. Heinberg confidently asserts:

the global economy is playing a zero-sum game, with an ever-shrinking pot to be divided among the winners

This is, to put it bluntly, laughable. It was crockery in 2011 and it’s only been proven more ridiculous as time has gone on. It goes back to my post from before about how everyone is always fighting the last war, in 2011 with growth still anemic this seemed like a defensible conclusion but today, not so much. And more broadly, history has proven this thesis to be wrong startlingly quickly: the Federal Reserve has a handy-dandy chart of US GDP in constant dollars (ie dollars accounting for inflation) and we can use it to see that in 2011 the GDP was about 17 trillion dollars, and by 2019 (the most recent year on the chart) it had climbed to 20.5 trillion; a growth of 20% over just 8 years. And it’s not like this is fake growth either, you can see it in the cars we drive and the gadgets we use: lane assist, rear-facing cameras for backing up, electric vehicles, hell even smartphones and tablets. These are all new and useful things that we didn’t have as much of in 2011. Just 31% of Americans owned a smart phone in 2011, today that number is nearly 90%. Just a quick look around us should dispense with this idea that growth has ended, even the consumption of oil, electricity, and natural gas have gone up. Real growth in our economy has occurred.

So the trend-line for America has most decidedly not been flat, but what about the rest of the world? Have we merely stolen growth from everyone else? Hardly. Look at China and India, two countries accounting for around 1/3 of the world’s population, their economic growth has continued to outpace America since even before 2011. They’re growing faster than us, using even more oil, electricity, and natural gas, and buying even more smartphones and electric cars than we are. They are definitely growing in a very real economic sense. And what about the rest of the world? Europe hasn’t grown quickly, but they are by now means trending downward, and neither are Africa, South America, or the rest of Asia and North America. Every part of the world’s economy has seen real growth in the past decade, with real increasing in living standards being the norm not the exception.

And this isn’t an illusion. Mr Heinberg seems strongly intent on portraying any semblance of “growth” as nothing more than an illusion created by debt, yet the fact that I’m typing this out on a laptop that’s computationally stronger than my 2011 desktop seems to put paid to that idea. Heck, I’m in science, 10 years ago Cryo-EM was barely able to do any of the stuff we take for granted today, now we can image and define the structure of thousands of proteins relatively easily. Is this just an illusion? Is our ever-expanding catalogue of verified antibodies for scientific experiments an illusion? What about the fact that just 2 years ago we invented and deployed an entirely new type of vaccine for a disease no one had ever heard of before? That literally happened, and it isn’t an illusion. Technology has continued to rapidly progress since 2011 and shows no signs of stopping, Mr Heinberg’s thesis on growth seems utterly ridiculous. And even our base inputs continue to go up, the amount of oil pumped and burned continues to go up year after year, alongside the amount of electricity the world is using. I’d love to hear Heinberg’s explanation for how world energy consumption keeps increasing year after year despite our growth having ended.

So why did Mr Heinberg think that growth was ending? Well I’ll have to keep reading, but I think that like I said he was simply fighting the last war. The Financial Crisis was a real shock to a lot of people, and the lethargic pace at which the world’s economy recovered from it made people think that it was a new normal. But it wasn’t. Secretly I also wonder if Mr Heinberg is of the heterodox economic school which believes that steady-state or even de-growth is preferable to economic growth. When one looks at all the resources humanity is using one instinctively feels they must eventually all run out. But Malthus predicted we’d outstrip our food supply centuries ago and despite him and many others believing this to be true, year after year people are eating more and living longer than they ever did, along with enjoying more and more of the amenities of modern life. I don’t know what Mr Heinberg was thinking when he wrote this book, but on the first page I can already say lol, lmao even.

Let’s see how he defends his thesis.

I’m amazed how little some of my friends can cook

Let me be clear, I barely cook. I can cook eggs, quesadillas, frittatas, burgers and some recipes out of a cookbook. I’m not some maestro of the kitchen and I rarely cook because I usually have faster options. But if necessary I can cook things that are edible and tasty enough to satisfy.

That’s why it’s in some ways baffling that I have so many friends who have cook even less than I do. I texted a picture of a baked-from-the-box brownie to one of my friends who replied “wow! you can cook really well!” You add water and bake, does it really count as cooking?

Eh, I guess this is how it is sometimes. Not everyone owns an oven, not everyone even has a full set of cookware in their apartments, especially people around my age. But still, brownies, they’re easy and delicious so you might as well learn to “cook” them.

Don’t put all your money into bonds

In fact, don’t put all your money into any single investment. I’m not anti-bonds, I’m pro-diversification.

As the Fed has continued to hike interest rates, I’ve been encountering a lot of chatter about buying bonds, and while I agree with some of it I’ve also seen talk saying that anyone with money in stocks is a moron and that everyone should sell everything they own and put it all into long-term government bonds. The benefits of government bonds are clear: they are a risk-free way to protect and sometimes grow your money. A bond is just a loan to the government and the government (whether the Federal government of America or the AA+ rated governments of Europe and the rest of the world) is not going to go bankrupt. Governments like Germany, America, and Japan will always pay their debts so purchasing a government bond is guaranteed to return your money to you at the end of the day. But just because they don’t have risk doesn’t mean they don’t have cost.

Everything in economics has an opportunity cost and this applies especially to bonds. There’s no guarantee that the investment you made was the best way you could have invested your money, even if you made a bit of money through it in the long run. Let me explain some of the opportunity costs you are facing when you buy bonds.

If you buy bonds today, you lock in a fixed interest rate for the length of the bond (let’s ignore I-bonds for now). That means you will receive a fixed amount of money for the length of the bond, plus you will be given back the initial amount you paid at the bond’s maturity. So if you buy a 10,000$ bond, and hold it to maturity, you will have made 10,000$ + 4% interest, it sounds like a great deal. But what other opportunities did you have with your money? Well in December the Fed will have another meeting, and it’s possible that they will once again raise interest rates. If that happens, you could buy a bond with around 4.75% interest instead of around 4%, so one of the opportunity costs you have is that if you just waited another month you could have bought a higher yield 10,000$ bond and made more money.

That’s not the only opportunity cost though, what if you suddenly have to make a big purchase? You could sell that 10,000$ 4% bond you purchased, it’s still worth somewhere close to 10,000$ if you bought it recently, but if you sell it after the Fed has raised interest rates you will find the price you can get for it is much lower than what you may have expected. That’s because your bond is paying a lower interest rate than what people can get buying new bonds, why spend 10,000$ to buy a 4% bond when you can spend 10,000$ to buy a 4.75% bond. So if you buy a lot of bonds then have to sell them after an interest rate hike, you’ll have lost out compared to if you had bought after the interest rate hike or if you had not bought at all.

Another scenario is that the Fed doesn’t hike interest rates but the markets recover. Say the inflation report comes out and shows inflation slowing substantially, in that case the Fed would have less reason to raise rates and the markets would have more reason to rally as people expect better times ahead. You’ve still got your 4% bond but markets on average rise 7% each year, so in an average year the stock market can be expected to give greater returns than buying a bond. In this case you haven’t lost any money but you’ve incurred an opportunity cost by buying bonds instead of stocks, you could have had greater returns buying stocks.

I’m not saying don’t buy bonds, bonds can be a good way to mitigate risk and ensure consistent returns. But I am seeing some people act like current trends will last forever, that the market will stay down forever and thus bonds are the only way to get any kind of return. I’m just saying that every action has an opportunity cost, and while buying bonds are low risk they are still a bet that interest rates won’t go much higher and the market won’t gain too much. Otherwise, you might have been better off putting your money elsewhere.

Every episode of Raw from 1999 is the same

I’m still on-again-off-again watching WWE Raw from 1999, here are my musing on it.

Every episode is the same and it’s killing me. Austin or the Rock shows up at the start with some promo/brawl, midcard stuff happens in the middle, a shot of Austin before each commercial break to let people know “DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL” but then he doesn’t come out until the very end and he doesn’t always even do anything. Throw in a little of Big Show and Undertaker to the mix and sprinkle with HHH and DX to taste. It’s not great. This was supposed to be the time when Raw was absolutely destroying Nitro in the rating, well either Nitro was just unwatchable (I’ll find out eventually) or Raw was coasting off of 1998 because this just isn’t captivating.

Where’s the creativity with Austin? With Foley? They’re great in creative segments but it feels like there’s none to be had. Austin and Foley showing up in Vince’s hospital room, that was to me absolute PEAK Attitude Era from the comedy to the drama to the catharsis of Vince chasing away the only man who could save him before getting a beating from Austin. Raw episodes from 1999 just aren’t creative in the slightest.

There is an element of this setup that I understand. Austin is THE star, he’s the absolute peak of the WWE, so they want to use him to draw in the viewers and keep them tuned in. That means constantly teasing him throughout the show but not actually showing him until the very end. Every single commercial in some of these episodes will be immediately preceded by a shot of Austin to trick the viewers into thinking he’ll be on for the next segment, but as someone watching these episodes without ads in 2022, this just gets tiring.

Even some of the catch-phrasing is boring this year. Between Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania of 1999 there was a stretch where no one updated their catch phrases, it was the exact same promo every week from people like Rock and Road Dogg. And to be fair it was great catch phrases and the audience would chant along, but that gets old eventually and at least after Wrestlemania they kind of started adding new bits again. Austin is a breath of fresh air because he never got completely fossilized, he would always give his Austin 3:16, he’d always talk about kicking a sombitch’s ass, but he didn’t just rattle off catch phrases and call it a day.

So yeah, what happened in 1999? Why did the program feel like it was in a holding pattern for most of the year? The big stars coming in and even the big story changes just aren’t as entertaining as anything that happened in 1998, and I’m not entirely sure why. I hope 2000 is better.

People are always fighting the last war

We live in a time of high inflation and rock bottom unemployment, but I remember less than a decade ago reading the prognosticators of economics talk about how low inflation and high unemployment (or underemployment) were the inevitable future of our economy. It was said with as much certainty as could be mustered that the Financial Crisis had fundamentally changed the nature of our economic reality, no more could we expect governments to bail us out (they all had too much debt), instead we were going to keep suffering for a long while for the profligate lending of the banks. Of course that wasn’t true, and neither is it true that inflation and low employment are a certainty for the rest of time.

What’s crazy to me is that both predictions were made with the same data. Our population is aging, globalization inevitably moves certain jobs overseas and forces American workers and companies to compete with those in foreign nations. Our government has high debt, real wage growth is anemic or negative, and the job of fixing all this has landed solely on the head of the Federal Reserve since the rest of the government can’t or won’t do so. This describes 2012 as much as 2022, and yet this evidence is used just as confidently by the takemongers of 2012 who predicted an eternal low-growth as the takemongers of 2022 predicting eternal inflation. It reminds me of all the sci-fi books and movies from the 70s and 80s predicting a far future of the 21st or 22nd century in which the Soviet Union still existed, people routinely project their current reality onto the future without any further thought. If pressed they’ll then use any evidence at all to defend their predictions, even if the same evidence could be used for an entirely different conclusion.

The 2010s were a period of low growth, low inflation, and high unemployment/underemployment. The 2020s have so far been a period of higher growth, high inflation, and very low unemployment. Both decades have challenges, and many of the challenges are the same. But I see no reason to believe that the trends of today will last forever.

How do bonds work

Seriously. I don’t get it. People are telling me “buy bonds, the market will explode” but when I went onto my brokerage I couldn’t understand a damn thing about what I was looking at. If anyone understands bonds, feel free to tell me what I should be doing.

Note: this post was made almost entirely in jest, I understand how bonds work but was miffed at how poor the front-end for buying them was at my brokerage. I’ll have a better post on bonds up later.