The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 33 – Investing in the Future
January 15, 2019
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you mean by investing in the future?
Rick Rosner: In the future, what is sad, mostly old people will have most of the money. It is sad for young people in the future. I did some math. It is not unreasonable to think 200% of the US population – 100 million people – out of a total population of 500 million people will be 100 years old or older, including 10% of the Millennials still surviving.
Because in 2100, the youngest Millennial will be 136. It is ridiculous to think that medical science won’t be able to keep somebody alive into their 140s by the year 2100. Probably 10% of the Boomers are still alive. That’s people born between 1945/56 and 1964. 60% of the Millennials will still be alive. That’s people born up to about 1995.
60% of Millennials plus Gen X, plus Gen Z born between 95 and 2005. 90% or 95% of those people will still be alive. You will have people not realizing that one of the engines driving some kind of economy is people dying and passing on assets.
In the future, people will be dying less. So, you’ll have only half of the privately held wealth in the country, which is great for the old and sucky for everyone else. By then, the necessities of life will be even cheaper and more likely to have something like guaranteed minimum income.
It is being taken care of if you do not have a job. Although, in America, the fight will be harder, because that sounds like Socialism to Americans. If you are lucky right now to have money, you might want to consider investing in the future.
You also might want to consider not investing in the future. Because the timeframe of the stock market is very short. Very little of the value of a company is what they might be worth five years from now or ten years from now.
Most of the value of the company is in a two-year time frame. It makes it tough to invest in individual companies in anticipation of the future. Some areas, you might want to invest in water.
Investing in the future involves, to some extent, being a bastard, you might want to buy stuff that might be in short supply in the future because water will be in short supply. Are there many future water companies projecting water as in short supply?
Not many, you want to invest in a bundle of stocks rather than individual stocks because future-ish companies are more speculative. You want to basically invest in mutual funds if you want to invest in things you think will be valuable 25, 50, 100 years from.
You can buy mutual funds that have water-based stocks that include utilities that supply water to people right now. In that package, 2% might be speculative water stocks, like someone setting up a cheap and easy water purification system for Africa.
It may or may not become a successful company. Biotech may become the world’s largest industry 30 years from now. Because, by then, biotech will be able to deliver decades of extra life to people.
If you’re dead, you can’t enjoy anything. So, life will be more valuable than anything. The companies that are able to extend life will be fantastically valuable. But they don’t exist yet. In the meantime, you want to invest in a biotech mutual fund.
But biotech is all over the place because it is semi-here but not really all the way. Biotech, the sector will go up and down fairly wildly. You can wait until it is cheap. Medical care for old people at senior living joints.
I’ve gotten burned on these. But the people in senior living joints are in their 80s, basically, which means that they were born before 1939. Then you’ve gone a boon coming when the Boomers start getting in their 80s, which happens in the mid-2020s.
You can invest in senior living and assisted living. Senior living is for those who can still participate in the aspects of life. Assisted living is for those who are starting to lose it. Often, like the place for my mother-in-law, she is in the senior living half for a combined joint, once you get sufficiently debilitated then you get moved over to assisted living.
There are a lot of places like this. Unfortunately, there are almost too many places like this because the boom hasn’t hit yet. So, some of the senior living stocks I’ve bught haven’t exploded in value yet.
I feel as if I hold those things into the 2020s. That they’ll still pay off. Obviously, you want to invest in AI, but individual companies will kick your ass, like Nvidia. It is this hot AI company. It has been up and down 30 or 40% over the past year.
You want to get a mutual fund that has a whole package of these. A whole bundle of these because most of these companies will not survive or thrive 8-10 years from now. 90% of the companies will either be out of business or puttering and sputtering along.
Then some will become gigantic. But you can’t predict which.
You can also look at stuff that will continue to hold value into the future like real estate. Most people think the population will hit 12 billion by the end of the century. I saw a report saying that there is slowing and the population may only reach 9.5 billion by the end of the century.
Even the low ball estimate of 9 and a half billion, it is an expansion of the population by about 20-25% by the end of the century. Real estate will probably not get less valuable until things get weird in the 22nd century when people live virtually.
But when you buy real estate in your neck of the woods, in Canada, it is in places that will become nicer as global warming disrupts the world. So, Canada is way too cold. Edmonton, if everybody lives for 7 months of the years, and then Edmonton is peppered with tunnels, as you can travel all-year-round, even when it is 12 below.
But winter in Edmonton might go fro 7 months to 5 months. You don’t want to invest in coastal communities or Florida real estate, but you might want to invest in a dike company. There are probably some huge engineering firms out of the Netherlands that know how to set up seawalls.
Invest in those things, Florida or even most of the Gulf of Mexico will be surrounded some kind of barrier system to prevent ocean surges from wrecking cities the way New Orleans was wrecked and the way Houston got hammered.
Anyway, that’s about it. Read science fiction and read about what people are predicting in the future and think about what might be valuable in that future.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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