Meltdown
Has the world changed? My most popular 2021 podcasts A reflection on meltdowns Come to my show, 11 Mar.
Has the world changed?
My most popular 2021 podcasts
A reflection on meltdowns: prose poem
Links: Giving up alchohol, climate policy/investing jobs; ESG study commentary; Asset Owners letter; Charlie Munger thoughts.
A short reflection on elements of the changing world. Many trends are slow burning. Especially several positive trends. For instance, on global life expectancy. A few percent a year on average slowly trending up.
Some trends move faster, for instance the price and cost of wind and solar energy. More noticeable and easy to miss that the trend is moving at a faster pace.
Still the trend is there to observe.
Less obvious is when there is a step change, some form of step up or step down. Or some complex interaction of factors. Partly these are less obvious because they are rarer and because the beginning of a step change may often be a false blip.
“This time is different” is often a losing phrase.
Some areas maybe are different. I judge (at 80% chance) that the advances in AI and protein (Deepmind break through) folding has given us a step change in that area, but it will take several more years to know if this is true.
It’s with great caution then that I contemplate that there may be a change in trend particularly in the rich economies. Probably not a step change, but several behaviours have changed and these changes together might lead to different ways of thinking and doing.
The factors are:
The money given out to dampen the negative impacts of the pandemic (demand)
The supply chain, and supply challenges (supply contraints), some pandemic caused (eg lockdowns), some perhaps structural (cf. difficulty in building new homes in California, or new public infrastrcuture in US).
Re-evaluation of how many people wish to work
The after effects of the money (and pandemic) has caused inflation (uneven but broad) in both goods and services, some temporary some structural (in proportions that economists argue about). Both supply (pandemic disruption) and demand (some people have money) changed.
This in turn is causing central banks to raise interest rates.
This is in turn (along with other pandemic induced behaviour changes) is causing (some) people to (re)evaluate how they want to live (“great resignation”) and causing how (some) people are valuing the future (things we haven’t invented) over the present (commodities like copper that we need now). Plus, there’s risk that banks set the interest rate “wrong”.
I judge enough people are thinking about this now, that this is a change in the environment to how people were thinking pre-pandemic. It may be a blip especially if we end up with the “correct” interest rate. However, there have been enough times in history where this caused a change for a little while (say 7 to 20 years) and I no longer dismiss that these new behaviors may be changing the trend.
You can observe this in the nervousness in the markets and the new difficulty in raising new capital for some companies.
The willingness to give companies capital has historically gone in cycles (interacting with interest rate and economic cycles etc). So in this sense, this maybe a following of the cyclical trend. Still, it’s noticeable and people smarter than me are worried and debating what’s happening and what to do.
As an side, crypto has elements of a big change that is still hard to know if it is a blip. Many smart people seem to be working in the area, so I’ve upgraded my estimate that it will hold to perhaps about 6%, but I know plenty of (smart) people still skeptical as plentiful use cases still have not really been found.
If you are free on March 11 would be really great to see you at my show.
One item I talk about is how so many cultures have an idiom or really an euphemism for death.
While some of these are quite poetic or allude to physical rituals or observations (wooden pajamas being a symbol for wooden coffins, cypress trees often being found in graveyards, salty duck eggs as funeral offerings), our euphemisms speak to the idea that we find talking straight about death as difficult and this - I argue (as does Clare Montagu) - is to our detriment.
There’s a lot of back and forth in ESG and sustainability land, as always. Two articles worth highlighting.
A letter in the FT from Faith Ward and peers (UK pension fund asset owners) on the value they see, and an updated article from Alex Edmans on the puts and takes of ESG.
There’s also an interesting comment from Billionaire Charlie Munger on the power of passive investments on votes (amongst many other thoughts).
“we’ve had this enormous transfer of voting power to these passive index funds. That is going to change the world. I don’t know what the consequences are gonna be, but I predict it will not be good. … I think the world of Larry Fink, but would not want him for my emperor…”
Meltdowns. I - and my family - have had to deal with “meltdowns” much more than I ever would have expected 12 years ago. Some use the phrase “tantrums” but a tantrum has an unfair connotation - a suggestion that we are in control of our actions to some degree. Meltdowns are unlike this. We have limited to no control. When I have a clear head I can see meltdowns are more akin to phobias or allergic reactions which are almost impossible to control. Sure “mindfulness”, calming techniques and the like can help. But those techniques require serious daily training like going to the gym or everyday prayers. They are not a quick fix.
I’ve also had to experience limited sleep and that zone before sleep especially when buzzed but tired where the mind can play strange dream-like thoughts not fully awake, not asleep.
This is a fictionalised reflection (prose poem?) on this, part written in the hypnosis of a train ride to nowhere in particular.
You lie on the sofa. The second best duvet not quite covering you. You are too tired to adjust the duvet. You are too tired to doom scroll your device. In any case, the phone hit your nose 7 minutes ago as your tired hand failed to provide the required support and the device flopped on to your face. The sting of shame larger than the sting of physical pain.
The fierce battle dissipated 21 minutes ago. The brain still too wired to sleep. Some would say not a battle but a tantrum. A tantrum captures an aspect of unreasonableness. This unreason is only in your world. Not their world.
Why not take the ice from the freezer and smash it all over the ground. The sound is surprising and pleasing. The texture a break from boredom. The action a pleasant contrast from sit sit sit.
Yes. The time is almost dawn but that time is much like any other in the present. The present time. The now time.
If not ice, why not the television, or the door, or the tea set you have used once for your wedding. These objects mere objects can contain the fractured rage of an indifferent misunderstanding world as well as ice. Does the squawking green parakeet living in the park care for the tea set?
No matter.
Oh no. The window shutter is broken. The physical reality of a broken shutter is not the intention despite the literal understanding to the contrary. Let’s break the [...]. Rage. The [...] is broken. Entropy is unreversed.
Tinder for a brain on fire.
This liminal time between night and day, waking and sleeping, the deep calm after a storm conjures these unanswerable philosophies.
You read somewhere. You are sure you recall. We are a country that cares for those who can not care for themselves. A civilisation that cares for those born without advantages.
Yet, seemingly, we do violence, or isolate, or do anything but care for so many of these people. Sure, you think, it must better than 100 years ago. Those graphs that draw up and to the right contain the weight of a million million blobs of data.
Who else would care for the shattering of ice at dawn. Who else would care to sleep in a corridor for worry for the New Year. Who else would wait an unknown length of time - seemingly one step below infinity - to risk the crossing of a doorway threshold. Who else has watched 1287 hours of the same three films dubbed from the Danish and scoring 2.4 on the internet movie database. Who else. Who else. Who else.
Those dawn birds. Do you sing because the sun shines light now? Every animal can see this light. Yet birds sing. This time. Sleeping. Not singing. No? The phone slips further down the sofa.
More on life a bit like this in my podcast with Sally Phillips.
The podcasts with Leopold Aschenbrenner along with my one with Aella remains my most popular podcasts of 2021.
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I am drinking much less these days and this is Anna Gat on why she has stopped. These is a “sober curious” movement and there’s quite a lot postive about it.
And climate / investment related jobs