My grandmother was seven years old when New York City had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5 million pounds (1.1 million kilograms) of manure each day. She lived to see the first man walk on the moon and the original Macintosh all-in-one personal computer.
In my lifetime, televisions went from the RCA CT-100 color TV set, which used 36 vacuum tubes with a 12-inch screen to a solid-state 75-inch Sony that live streams off the Internet. When someone denigrates the “Boomer” generation, I know that I am dealing with an ignorant person who has no historical perspective. Ok, that is not entirely true. They know that their Smartphone is an “Apple iPhone 13,” not “XIII,” Roman numerals being far too advanced.
The recent generations call them “gadgets;” my generation calls them “Technological miracles.” A “gadget” is the creative brilliance of combining a toothpick and a nail-cutter on the same “Swiss Army knife.” Except in 1851, chapter 107 of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville mentions the “Sheffield contrivances, of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, and nail-filers.”
The American comic strip (which “Boomers” grew up with) featuring Dick Tracy debuted the two-Way Wrist Radio in 1946. Martin Cooper, now 93 years old, invented the first handheld cellular mobile phone (distinct from the car phone) in 1973. In 2015, Cooper himself said that his actual inspiration was Dick Tracy’s wrist radio.
In truth, no generation is any “smarter” than another. In the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Who is smarter; Elon Musk or Hero of Alexandria who invented the steam engine? Except, Roman engineer Vitruvius described the steam engine 100 years before Hero.
What I see shifting in the past 30 years is a decline of intellectual curiosity. Are we losing the desire to learn more and to experiment more outside of our comfort zone?
The difference between an “expert” and a genuine expert is that the expert is always challenging and questioning prevailing thought and even his/her own ideas. Two experts whose names you need to know and works you need to read are American investor Ray Dalio and Iranian-American economist Nouriel Roubini.
Dalio sees one critical way how the world order is changing. Dalio: “Right now, there are vastly more financial assets [stocks, debt, even cryptos] than there are real assets [buildings, factories, commodities, and other ‘hard’ usable assets].” So, what would happen if there was a move to convert the financial assets into hard assets? “Central banks would certainly respond by printing a lot of money to allow people to get the money.”
“Throughout history, a crisis eventually occurred when many holders of these financial assets went to sell them and discovered that there were far too many of them.”
Roubini the Economist is concerned about the political shifts that will affect economies. “The Sino-American cold war is getting colder. China increasing its military pressure on Taiwan and in the South China Sea and the broader decoupling between the Chinese and US economies, is accelerating.” Also, “Political dysfunction is increasing in both advanced economies and emerging markets. The US is experiencing near-unprecedented levels of partisan polarization, gridlock, and radicalization, all of which poses a serious systemic risk.”
Both share concerns about “wealth disparity” and not the “Eat the Rich” nonsense unless of course you are also talking about nations north and south, east and west, and debtors and creditors.
Remember the conversations about “global vaccine inequality”? Mainstream media NBC News headlined “Covid Omicron variant linked to vaccine inequality, experts say. Global vaccine inequality is “worse than ever”—and accusations that rich countries have been hoarding shots for themselves.” Now that the US just topped one million new cases in a single day and “South Africa Reports Omicron Peak Has Passed,” “vaccine inequality” is no longer a hot topic.
The reality though is that one person’s debts are another person’s assets, and many nations like the Philippines has stayed out of this fool’s debt game.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.