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…
Aging Out I am finding myself using that term, aging out, more and more often these days. The term requires no definition as it is pretty self-explanatory, it simply means that you are getting too old to do something that you have done for a long time and that you presumably like to do, but can no longer do either easily or in a way that you prefer. It can also mean that you are…
A Sunday Selection In retirement, one day of the week wanders into the next with barely a care. My pal Mike and I have made a point of keeping track of each other’s minimalist schedules, almost as though our prior working lives, so governed by scheduling, require some outlet. Mike plays formal senior softball games on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and usually a pick-up game on Monday morning. He does home shores like vacuuming and…
Trash Talk Today is Wednesday, which means it is trash day here in Hidden Meadows, or at least on our little hilltop within Hidden Meadows. I don’t make it my business to know the trash pick-up schedule of the local surroundings, though the very visible trash cans at the curb are a dead giveaway, so I suppose I could figure it out if I cared to. In actuality, Thursday is the pick-up day, but Wednesday…
A Stuffed Generation I was speaking with my youngest son Tom today and he was discussing the day he spent yesterday helping his mother empty and mostly discard a NYC storage room that had been cluttered with miscellaneous junk accumulated over the years. He described the struggle of getting concurrence from his mother that this stuff was no longer needed in her life. While I have always eschewed storage rooms for the exact reason he…
The Garden of Eden All of the religions that honor Abraham as their founder embody a version of the fabled garden that sits at the center of the ancient world where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow together in Mesopotamia. That area now has a very bad rap since it constitutes the entire country of Iraq and up into Syria and Southern Turkey. If the rampant warfare wasn’t enough, the forces of nature have conspired…
Keeping Up I speak often about teaching and what it means to me. But now that I’ve done it at the graduate level for thirteen years, ten at Cornell and three so far at USD, I am approaching an inflection point and decisions will need to be made. Last week I bumped into the Chairman of the Finance Department, who is my boss for the Advanced Corporate Finance course that I have taught for two…
Stepping It Up Today was a nice sunny day, but a bit on the cool side. I am starting to teach my course tonight, so I plan to leave my afternoon pretty open to get my game face on and do a few course administrative chores. I have been waiting for clear weather for a few days so that I could get some things done in advance of Joventino’s arrival tomorrow. I have bought 600…
Still Standing or Standing Still I am constantly in awe of the natural world. There are plenty of times in life when we go about our business of the moment and don’t give our immediate or broader surroundings a moment’s thought. I suppose that is the normal state of affairs for life forms that must struggle to keep the spark of existence alive. The Protozoa does not spend much time contemplating its existence or worrying…
The Population Irony In 2013 I published my first book about the global pension crisis. Pensions involve demographics and the demographics of China at the time were screaming that the thirty plus year old one-child policy of China was becoming an economic and pension issue for China. The fundamental issue is that economic growth cannot be had without population growth. It is an economic credo that is hard to avoid. And China had implemented what…