Courtesy of Michael Panzner at When Giants Fall
Out of the large universe of so-called experts, there are only a relative few, as I noted in a post at Financial Armageddon, worth paying attention to. One of those individuals is Jeremy Grantham, chairman and co-founder of global investment firm GMO, who I don’t always agree with, but whose opinions I have always respected. In fact, I’ve noted his insights on several occasions — see "For Some, a Total Loss," "Give ‘Em Enough Hope…," "Another Permabear Who Doesn’t Know What He Is Talking About?" and "Words from the Wise" — but I haven’t really strayed to far outside the realm of financial markets and economics. Now, though, Mr. Grantham is out with his latest quarterly newsletter, and it includes a section (excerpted below), entitled "Initial Report: Running Out Of Resources," about a somewhat broader theme that features prominently in my new book, When Giants Fall:
Getting Used to Lower Growth and Higher Prices
As the economy sorts itself out from the recent financial turmoil, we are very likely to have lower growth rates for quite a few years. We described the reasons for this last quarter: writing down excessive loans and curtailing expenditures as we realize we are not as rich as we thought.
Economic expansion will also be held back by the decreasing growth of available man hours. Since 2000, this growth has declined to below 1% per year from an average of 1.62% for the prior 50 years. Over the next 30 years, it is almost certain to continue to decline to about 0.5%, ignoring the temporary cyclical bounce in employment that we will get as the current severe recession ends.
Behind these two issues, however, lurks another longer-term and more important factor affecting future growth, and that is the increasing limitations on resources: we are simply running out of everything at a dangerous rate. We apparently have trouble processing numeric issues of this kind, and this missing faculty will cause considerable grief. We do not understand the implications of exponential or compound growth rates: the main implication being that they are impossible to sustain.
No better example of resource limitation in the face of both denial and strong efforts can be found than
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.
