It is precisely those who (plausibly) preach prudence in manipulating the natural world who are most cavalier about smashing and rebuilding social institutions. --Munger


Mom and I had dinner at The Vandal last night. First time we've sat down in a week. The place was earnest and the food was mostly good.
We go to Montreal today. We'll meet Liz, Ned and Caroline. I did not manage the online checkin well.

The Government and the Press have finally completely befuddled me. This new impeachment effort; is this what is meant by "jumping the shark?" Do you just keep the process going, rolling from one innuendo to another, hoping one gets traction? Does a partisan whistleblower carry more weight than a partisan retired British spy? And at what point do your partisan failures lose you the moral high ground?

Carden writes, "Price gouging laws are effectively knowledge embargoes." Price increases aren't arbitrary impositions on the part of the callous and the mean. As Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok explain, "a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive." Price is how markets communicate.

In the 1980s, the national debt amounted to 30 percent of US GDP; by the mid-1990s, it was up to 65 percent. Today we're at more than 100 percent, and rising. Merely paying the interest on the debt will cost Americans almost $400 billion this year. And that's at today's super-low interest rates. If those rates go up — when those rates go up — the government's interest obligations will skyrocket. By 2025, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have projected, interest on the national debt will surpass the defense budget.
    

The last twenty years have disrupted investing generalities. This is an interesting article from M.W.. Edward McQuarrie, a professor emeritus at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in California, has painstakingly reconstructed U.S. stock- and bond market returns back to the late 1700s. Except for 40 of the past 220 years — 1942 through 1982 — stocks and bonds have produced essentially equal returns.

The net effect of his findings is to reduce estimates of what researchers refer to as the “equity premium” — the margin by which stocks outperform bonds. Previous research had found this premium to be much larger — as much as six or more annualized performance points, according to some studies. McQuarrie’s best guess, based on the entire period since 1793, is that the premium is just 1.7 annualized percentage points. The more shocking implication of McQuarrie’s data is not that the equity premium is far smaller than previously thought. It’s that, for some periIf our investment horizons are like the average experience between 1793 and 1942, or since 1982, then there may be no equity premium. If we do decide to make a big bet that stocks will outperform bonds, then we in effect are betting that the future will be more like the 1942-1982 experience than the decades before or since.ods over a lifetime and longer (think about your heirs), there is no equity premium at all. 

                                     The Children

Life is the abstract meeting policy. Kipling wrote this poem on the death of his only child. On September 27, 1915, Second Lieutenant John Kipling of the British army, the son of Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling, was killed at the Battle of Loos, in the Artois region of France.

The Children

By Rudyard Kipling

1914-18("The Honours of War"—A Diversity of Creatures)

These were our children who died for our lands: they were dear in our sight.

    We have only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter.

    The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not another’s hereafter.

Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it.    That is our right.

        But who shall return us the children?

At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,

    And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us,

    The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time prepared for us—

Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.

They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,

Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment o’ercame us.

They believed us and perished for it.    Our statecraft, our learning

Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning

Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour—

Nor since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.

Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.

    The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:

    Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,

Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marveling, closed on them.

That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given

To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven—

By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled in the wires—

To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes— to be cindered by fires—

To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation

From crater to crater.    For that we shall take expiation.

        But who shall return us our children?