The Fall

It's a lovely morning, and I was all teed up to write about the crispness of the air, how nice it is to have on sweatpants, etc, when I started watching a video of an interview on CNBC (which I try not to watch) with Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine (who is indeed very smart). I didn't get very far, because the day is too short to watch this kind of thing, or, rather, I have higher impact things that I need to do.

But it did take me back to a fundamental point: there is so much discussion and thought in the markets about monetary determinism: interest rates, money supply, blah blah blah. When fundamentally the drivers of economic growth are population size and productivity. The developing world is troubled by shrinking populations. Everywhere birth rates are below 2.1, including the USA. It's worst in Japan, South Korea, Finland (I think), but everywhere rates are low. Meanwhile there are people around the developing world who want in.

We need to let more of them in, to support economic growth. Which doesn't necessarily need to mean more interstates and McMansions. And our lives are so much happier and better when we let more of them in. The food is more interesting, people get more interesting and beautiful when people from different places fall in love and have children, music gets better... It's all good.

But our political culture is going in exactly the wrong direction with the expansion of neo-nationalism. And we need to fix that.

I don't know who is having conversations with the angry white men and women of the hinterlands about what they are doing on at least a monthly if not a weekly/daily basis to expand their skillsets and become more marketable. Do they listen to books in the car, or do they listen to talk radio that just pisses them off? I suspect the latter.