Time is on Our Side Dear Daily Prophecy Reader, Today, I’d like to take a look at an old prophecy while I finish up my research on the next Monthly Issue of The George Gilder Report. Keep scrolling… My friend and indefatigable blogger John Mauldin is holding his Strategic Investment Conference these days online. No carousing in Starbucks with sultry Hong Kong Keynesians, or dancing with old friends from Dallas, or watching Seth Curry on the NBA playoffs on TV at the bar, or flirting with John’s pulchritudinous Shane. No early morning runs along the beach with surprised fans of Life After Google. Streaming in over the antiseptic fiber are a pixilation of economists and financiers, from libertarian philosopher Matt Ridley, launching his new book on Innovation, to the shrewd and prolific Charles Gave, of GaveKal Research in Hong Kong, touting a shift toward Asian currencies, as the toilet-paper rotation of fiat monies hits high torque. I’ll miss the in-person coruscation of the British viscount and the Hong Kong sage, among many other voices. But with the world wilting before our eyes, we will have to wait ‘till doomsday for the politicians and media pundits to admit the egregious mistake of quarantining the healthy in order to fecklessly protect the frail from at most a marginal 0.5% global rise in current historically low rates of mortality. Seriously folks, if the panic mongers and coffin chasers had not held their daily public potlatch and caterwaul, no one would even have noticed a few hundred thousand line-jumping fogies in the global queue of life. And if they had not been locked into their nursing homes and apartments, they would have done much better. Oh well, life limps on… But in response to the doldrums, Mauldin quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing in 1830 in reply to pessimists of his day: “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point — that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason… On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’’ Good question, John. Then Mauldin segues into a casual citation of time-prices without acknowledging that they refute nearly all the other economic data recounted at his conference. John quotes from a famous essay by Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus of Yale. He got his Nobel in 2018 for a pandering poison ivy paper on climate change and carbon taxes. But in 1993, before his Nobel mistake, he made a true breakthrough. In a paper titled, “Do Real Income and real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” “Real world GDP, after inflation, is up over 15X since [Macaulay] wrote that. The cost of a candle in 1800 that would let you read, however dimly, for one hour, was six hours of labor. Today that same amount of light costs about 3/10 of a second of human labor.” So, which is it John? Real GDP up a mere fifteen fold? Or measured by time-prices — the number of hours and minutes a person has to work to earn the money to buy goods and services — is real output up some 72,000 times? |
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