It’s really fascinating when someone puts themselves in the minority role and finds it uncomfortable but then does not go on to reflect about how the current powerful group they belong to is behaving. Also I am not sure if it’s implied every African is Nigerian which I assume from the use is a perjorative term.
I work for a one of the biggest investment companies globally and I normally lead the leadership training. One of the things I try to get people to identify is when we use our size to get what we want and role play on how we can engage without menacing others. All my leadership mentors are female because they have to learn to lead from a position of societal disadvantage.
Quite a lot of this discussion is about what to do about the lower income earners. Germany introduced social welfare because Marx was from there. You either do some reforms voluntarily or you go through progressive periods of more and more radicalisation. To me Trump is paving the road down that road.
We have a scenario now where we say the economy is at full capacity but inflation is the biggest determinant in this last election. What we have is a free for all economy driven by demand and supply but because everyone has one vote those that we think deserve low wages are going to out vote everyone else because votes are determined by issues. It’s kinda a cycle. Our economic policy creates social problems that require a political solution. The longer we treat the economic issues as separate from the other issues the more pressure builds up and the more drastic a solution is needed.
I am unsure of which of my earlier posts you are referring to but I did not use “Nigerian” as a pejorative. Quite the contrary as I have met many people from Nigeria and other African countries and have enjoyed my relationships with them.
I am hoping you can clarify this so we can engage more on it if necessary.
No problem. Thanks for clarifying. I have visited Nigeria several times on business (and many other African countries) and have met many fine people. I was very fortunate during my career to meet people of many different backgrounds so I do not see the world as “us and them”.
But it’s a bad moon rising for America’s favored version of corporate capitalism.
A fundamental element of the current ideology is growth. Companies must grow. Grow revenues, grow profits, grow market share. Declining population presents some serious headwinds to that philosophy.
Instead of advertising…it means growth will be dependent on productivity gains. That’s bad news for dock workers and the like. Expect increasing automation, fewer unskilled jobs, and stagnant equity markets. Just my 2 cp.
Be interested in other’s thoughts on the topic. Gotta restructure my investments, as best I can.
But so much of their growth is in advertising revenue. Will that continue into the second half of this century? I have my doubts.
I like to play the long game. Anticipate long term trends and what not. Picking the winner of a ten horse race is too much speculation for my blood. And lawd only knows what China and India are going to do…huge opportunities that the current US mood seems to be willing to let them have (tariffs)
Look at the valuation of nvidia, apple, google, msft, tesla, palantir, etc. It’s insane. Markets are driven by narratives and the narrative right now is that AI will boost productivity. And considering how these algorithms work, nobody really knows what’s going to happen. There’s a very small probability that the hype will materialize but the upside is essentially boundless. And if the hype doesn’t materialize then I expect american society to break as the insurance of the past (gov spending + money printing) is no longer there due to the federal debt being so high. So we’re in a high risk environment.
I was looking back at the dot com bubble as a possible parallel to what we are seeing with AI now.
I thought this quote from the dot com bubble wiki page was interesting:
In a 2015 book, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who funded many dot-com companies and lost 90% of his net worth when the bubble burst, said about the dot-com bubble:
A friend of mine has a great line. He says “Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance. Meaning that you need some of this mania to cause investors to open up their pocketbooks and finance the building of the railroads or the automobile or aerospace industry or whatever. And in this case, much of the capital invested was lost, but also much of it was invested in a very high throughput backbone for the Internet, and lots of software that works, and databases and server structure. All that stuff has allowed what we have today, which has changed all our lives… that’s what all this speculative mania built.”
