Reading history

A month or so ago I picked back up the 2008 Enough by John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and therefore one of the most influential figures in finance in the last half century. Without Bogle and the index-investing revolution his firm spearheaded, people would be paying a whole lot more for their investments and therefore keeping a whole lot less of their money. Lots of talented people who would otherwise have been subsumed by the mutual fund industry have been set free to do other things. Though it would be interesting to look at total headcount and revenue for the asset management profession over time. Maybe they've all been sucked into hedge funds and private equity and credit. Or, perhaps, financial planning.

But I digress. One of the interesting features of the book is how Bogle spends a lot of energy decrying the obscene salaries paid to top hedge fund managers (admittedly, I'm still asking the same question above). Back then it seemed outragerous that hedge fund titans were being paid hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year to do what they did/do.

How far in the past that now seems. It would still seem obscene, if it didn't pale in comparison to the rapidity with which tech titans acrue wealth these days. For example, as Oracle has gone parabolic of late, CEO and founder Larry Ellison's net worth has increased by about $100 billion over the last month. Such a sentence would have read like science fiction when Bogle was writing his book.

The world changes fast. What seems certain today may sound quaint a decade hence.

I had other reflections on a similar theme but as the temperature rises out here on the porch, the time draws nigh for me to make good on my promise to myself that I will add some brown matter to our active compost pile, which is too green and moist, even if the deer continually eat the really good stuff (especially watermelon rinds) we throw off of our deck down into it, long before it can meld with the rest of the compost. The deer, at least, process the food in their own special way.