Monday, November 29, 2010

a veritable carbuncle of magical thinking...,

Bubblegeneration | It's the oft-unspoken thought on many lips: America's in decline. The glory days are over, the train's left the station. So: is this a great decline? Unfortunately--probably. And I'd suggest that when you take a hard, serious look into the economy--when you voyage past it's superficial, largely irrelevant position in terms of budgets, "gross product", or "unemployment"--that great decline is deeper and darker than pundits, beancounters, and politicians think, want to admit, or even suspect.

The great crisis is a story of structural decline: a decline that's hardwired into the patterns amongst this great machine's many parts. They've settled, over the last three decades and more, into fundamentally bad, toxic equilibria--where speculation precedes investment, model precedes reality, management and financial jargon is a substitute for real insight, cheap talk substitutes for hard work, and indulgence has replaced inspiration.

America's great decline is the emergent product of a set of toxic equilibria. The sum is greater than the whole of the parts: this decline is a complex, nonlinear combination of interdependent, linked components settling into an unforeseen level of breakdown. You might say it's the dynamic equilibrium of a complex system, akin to an attractor, where the economy's stuck in a corner of performance space that limits long-run value creation to dwindle ever further.

Hence, I'd suggest a simple, but perhaps radical, conclusion: it's learning to invest in companies, ideas, and insights that break all the bad equilibria above that will separate tomorrow's outperforming [countries, companies, and investors] from those stuck in the gears of a great decline.

0 comments:

Bill Gates Is An Expression Of Official American Foreign Policy Toward Africa

Best ever video to explain the elemental evil of Bill Gates and his infernal foundation. No need to thank me: pic.twitter.com/KRDBnLV7D7 — I...