The Corn Belt There are very few foods I like better than steamed corn on the cob, with lots of butter and salt. In fact, I can easily make a meal out of two or three ears and be very happy with that. Kim understands this and knows that when the summer season rolls around, I am always in search of my next corn dinner. So, today I am on my way to Des Moines,…
A-Aye-Aye-Aye There is nothing like having a front row seat for a megatrend as it starts to roll through and over world culture. It is well established that we are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Chairman of the World Economic Forum has said unequivocally that “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.” It is generally…
The Hole in My Pocket As a storyteller, I often quip to people that when and if I ever write my proper autobiography (as though these blog stories don’t effectively do that already), I already have a title all picked out for it. I am a big title guy and often use a title to lead me into or out of a story. I guess there is a part of this storyteller that is also…
Ringing the Bell When we moved here more than three years ago, we had to make lots of arrangements to accommodate being here full time rather than only once in a while. We had owned the house for eight years while we thought about when the right time to retire might be. On Wall Street, for various reasons including the stress of the work and the hard head banging that goes on in the business,…
Butter and Markets I am just finishing reading 48 essays on Free Markets for my ethics class. The assignment I gave was to discuss the pros and cons of free markets in the context of being a asylum-seeking immigrant from Central America. It has proven to be a fascinating exercise (at least for me, but I also think for the students) because it has forced them to consider the libertarian value of free market capitalism…
The Demographic Dividend I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about demographics. That stems from my writing of Global Pension Crisis in 2013, because you cannot talk about pensions and retirement dynamics without getting into demographics. I wrote that book on the back of a course I taught about pensions at Cornell’s business school from 2008 until 2017. In fact, I found the demographics that I kept seeing and tallying every year when I…
Self-Education Due to a clogged roof drain on our flat roof over by the office side of the house, during the heavy rains of March we developed a leak. We went through the normal process of sleuthing out the origin on the leak by having Handy Brad open up the outside wall between the sliding glass door and the window next to my desk. That was an area of about six feet wide, floor to…
Buying Quality I’ve just written about how overpriced the world has become and how difficult it has become to capture value in today’s world of runaway generational wealth expectations. What I mean by that is that people seem to feel like they are being stupid if all they do is get by and earn a fair wage. Everyone wants to own their own business and sell it at some wonderfully high multiple and spend their…
Killing Myself Softly When I was in college we had music and we had TV, but there were no home computers, no internet, no Worldwide Web, and certainly no social media. There are many things that these advancements have provided us and I have generally been a big proponent of technological advance. I would go so far as to say that I have positioned myself until recently on the bleeding edge of that change. I…
The 8 Billion Person Paradox National Geographic magazine continues to amaze me and feed me information that is relevant to the most important issues we face today. The April, 2023 issue just arrived on my doorstep with a cover graphic that looks like the earth transformed into some combination of a high-viz articulated world map and a funky coronavirus with spiky outcroppings. The large title emblazoned across the globe simply declared “8 BILLION” with a…