Later this month, you may read about Warren Buffet winning a million dollar Long Bet in which he wagered that:
"Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S&P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses."
On the other side of the bet was, and is, Protege Partners, a Hedge Fund that has already lose the bet, as there is no way for the world of hedge funds to cover Buffet's now massive lead.
More than 10 years ago I also made a Long Bet but not one about markets, but about the human condition. Specifically, I bet Steven B. Kurtz that:
“Over the next ten years, we will make measurable global progress in all five areas of the human condition: food, access to clean water, health, education, and the price of energy.”
As part of that bet I let Steven pick any metric from each of the five indices, and I further stipulated that he would win the bet if ANY of the five indicators showed a global negative trend over the 10-year life of the bet.
I won.
I mention this as an introduction to these 5 interactive graphs from Our World in Data.
That's the good news.
The bad news, as I noted in my bet, is that we need to measure the world in more than direct indices of of human welfare.
While I believe human welfare will improve, I also believe we will lose both wild places and wild creatures for the next 50 to 75 years as forests are fragmented, coastal and pelagic systems are over fished, reef systems are destroyed, wetlands are drained, and market hunting continues apace in some parts of the developing world. To put it another way, I believe that the human condition will generally improve for the next 10 years (and for the 50 years after that) while many overall negative trends for wild places and wildlife will continue apace. In short, I believe the history of the last 500 years will continue for the next 10 years and the next 50 years after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment