| Two Pioneering Economists Outline Investing in a World Gone Covidious  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
How do you invest in a world gone covidiously cuckoo? In Bill Bonner’s trope: wandering through life facelessly suspended “between six feet apart and six feet under?” In a country that locks down its healthy and productive citizens, while refusing even to molest, let alone lock up, crazed mobs of masked arsonists and burglars in the streets? How do you soldier on without despair in the throes of the doomsday Adventist cult of COVID-19, with its Archpriest Anthony Fauci on Tuesday trumpeting a “Second Coming” of the virus, as a scourge for sinners in the hands of an angry doctor? He probably means you and me, folks. Indignant at Southern and Western states that have apparently unleashed salacious “surges” of viral YouTube porn after opening up their economies, the reverend doctor stormed: “Just look at some of the film clips that you've seen! Of people congregating! Often without masks!” Don’t deny it, you yourself may have taken a prurient peek or two at the shocking scenes of happy faces. Some of the celebrants are adopting strange new and kinky positions: “Of being in crowds… and jumping over, avoiding, and not paying attention to the guidelines that we very carefully put out.” Predicting hundreds of thousands of infections a day unless the misbehavior stops, the Doctor seemed shaken by the guideline-scoffers: “We're going to continue to be in a lot of trouble. And there's going to be a lot of hurt.” Don’t say he didn’t warn you! Meanwhile, with the all-cause death rate in this decade still the lowest of the century, death rates plummet around the world, while the spikes and surges affect only test-rates and media spins. In the index of COVID death rates per thousand people, the Southern and Western rebels remain an order of magnitude behind the lock downers in New York. Texas’s per capita COVID death rate is just 6% of the death rate of New York; Arizona’s is 16%. William Briggs and David Stockman are both on top of the data. Intelligent investors will ignore the pandemonium and seek the signal in the noise. They are always ready to invest in the midst of a Schumpeterian “gale of creative destruction.” And in the future, they will take solace from understanding the message of time-prices, which gained impressive new momentum and authority with recent researches from the anti-doomsday voices of Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley. Time-Price Theory Meets COVID-19 Time-prices are the only true prices. They gauge the number of hours and minutes you have to work in order to buy goods and services. An index of economic progress, they combine in one number both the rise of incomes and the drop in prices resulting from the advance of innovation. In the past, Pooley and Tupy have confined their measurements and observations to the relatively halcyon years between 1980 and 2018. During this period, while world population increased 73%, the prices of 50 key commodities of life, measured in the work hours to buy them, dropped 71% and their abundance grew 518%. Nowhere was evidence of “peak commodities” or unsustainable resources. As population grew, commodities grew yet more abundant per capita. Human populations do not burden the planet; they proliferate its bounties. Although an exciting breakthrough in economic statistics, this evidence of surging economic growth and progress fails to offer guidance to investors for a time of economic and social catastrophe such as today. As Steven Pinker of MIT has documented in several books, the era between 1980 and 2018 has been a time of unprecedented peace, productivity, and increasing longevity. | 
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