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Originally Posted by manaboutown
My greatest concerns are the huge national debt and our disappointing (to say the least) public school systems which have been declining since the SAT scores peaked during the early 1960s. Student scholastic performance has gone downhill ever since. The decline became so blatantly and embarrassingly obvious the SAT was dumbed down in 1994. Today most colleges need to offer remedial English and Math courses to incoming students. The future does look grim.
Of course a large war could erupt or we could be hit with another pandemic. My father got and survived the Spanish Flu in 1918 but it killed more people that did The Great War. One just never knows.
An easy to read classic written about investors' experiences during the Great Depression era is "Where are the Customers' Yachts?" by Fred Schwed Jr. I found it rather chilling.
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I ordered the book. It just arrived. Interesting copyright dates: 1940; 1955; 1995; 2006. The author died in 1966, but it looks like his book has lived on. I looked at the CIP (Cataloging-in-Publication) and saw that Humor is among the subject headings.
Humor sounds good to me right now. I see nothing amusing about these uncharted economic waters though.
The last investment book I read(ish) was the latest edition of
A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It was far more entertaining than I thought it would be. I skimmed some of the chapters, but the ones about the behavior of humans when it comes to investing were fascinating, although not surprising. (The guy who ate the “precious” tulip bulb because he thought it was an onion had certainly horrified the other guy who had invested in the bulb. But we all now know which one was stupid.)
About your little seque into schools — your concerns have more complex answers than what I am willing to sit here and type. For years I have said that someday we could come under a regime that would decide kids should just be at home staring at screens with talking heads giving instruction according to said regime. Just think of the money that would save. No buildings. No buses. A handful of puppet teachers. Yeah, just think and think again. No more of those pesky critical thinking skills to worry about. (shudder)
Fahrenheit 451 the classic about book burnings and every home with screens everywhere was considered to be fiction when it was written. Now it could be a concept of a plan.
Re. Concerns about the deficit: It looks like we are in for slash and burn because that does not require an actual plan with a well thought-out approach to government spending, a plan by people who actually know what they are doing and do not have tunnel vision — but I don’t see good sense coming. The effects of what it looks like is actually coming will be seismic throughout the entire economy.
All we can do now is hope for the best and plan for the worst. But the American people have no frame of reference for what could come, the effects of which will be felt by all of us, no matter what we wished for.
Yep. Pogo sure was right.
Boomer