Hans Rosling was an impressive public speaker, with not just an ability to distill complex topics into easy to understand stories, but to do so with a flair of showmanship. One of the many lessons in those stories was the fact that the world is no longer divided into “developed” and “developing” economies, but is instead is now a world with a continuum of incomes. What...
The biggest employer in your neighborhood is likely not one big factory or hospital, nor the government or military. It’s unlikely any one corporation at all. The biggest employer nearly everywhere are the multitude of small businesses that operate the plethora of services needed to make up the modern lifestyle.
China had its economic boom… and this year saw its population peak at 1.4 billion and shrinking. India is in the middle of its economic boom… passing up China’s population with another 1.4 billion population, but with that population growth slowing down. Africa is the other place on earth with 1.4 billion people. Not a single country, but 54 countries, but also an area far...
Seven years ago I wrote and delivered a talk about how we leave the big problems of the worlds for the philanthropists to solve, but they just don’t have enough money to do that. The 2020 update to that talk is below. Short story shorter… the total amount of money in philanthropy is less than $1 trillion, less than the value of just Microsoft alone, a tiny fraction of the total...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, and he was still telling people he was retired in 1974. If you missed my first blog post about Buffett’s retirement, best to start with that one, which left off at the cliffhanger asking how he got from there to Berkshire Hathaway. Halfway...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, never to be heard from again. The first half is completely true. The second, true as of the end of 1969. Learning about both of those facts has dropped me down a fascinating rabbit hole of corporate history and Buffett lore that I’ll...
Imagine the game Monopoly, but instead of every player starting the game with $1,500, create a pile of $5s, $10s, $20s, $100s and $500s that add up to $5,000, shuffle the money, and deal it out one bill at a time to the players. Some will have start with more than $1,500 and some with far less. Or to be even more like the real world, all but one player starts with $100 and the last player gets...
Over the years I’ve asked many smart people why, after the historic public market crash of 1929 did the U.S. Government then pass the Securities Act of 1933, which disallows the sale of shares in private companies to every American? Not surprisingly, given the hows and whys of laws written before not only the Internet but also before radio are mostly lost to history. But now we have a new...
The word “poverty” has two different common meanings. First, it is the smallest income level in any given country. E.g. in the United States, over 20% of children live in poverty. Second, is the more global view, with the International Poverty Line set by the World Bank, at just $2.15. The chart above shows the drastic difference in incomes between those two definitions. Do note that...
What is money? It’s a simple question to ask but the answer is complicated. I know, as I’ve read and blogged about Wealth, Capital, Debt, Lords, Americana, and America’s Bank, amongst a lot of far dryer, far more challenging economic history books. Then along came Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, and wow, what a difference...
