Email: Economics

How is an economist writing about trade, entrepreneurs, interest, and banking any different than you writing about making a successful video game console? They’re doing the same thing as you, making observations and writing about them. You don’t have to be Warren buffet to observe how people respond to incentives or how bad government policy affects things. Some economists are better at observing than others, that’s all.

1) Economists are not businessmen or entrepreneurs. The discipline of economics doesn’t teach people how to sell.

2) I’m not selling anything on this website. One can imagine my opinions to be insane, but they cannot imagine them formed for profit making purposes. There is no product being sold here.

3) I’m not telling people to ‘enjoy the decline’.

There was a popular book by the name of ‘The Millionaire Next Door’. The book advised a life of saving and living on the cheap, and then you become a millionaire at an old age. I consider it a viciously evil book. Why? Well, it advises a non-life. Money is to be enjoyed. Life is to be enjoyed. Constantly living like a poor person to ‘get a million dollars’ is not living. There are reasons to save and to live cheap but to do so your entire life?

Have you ever had the experience of regret of not applying yourself in school or trying hard in a class? You kinda ‘went through the motions’ but never really gave it your all? Have you ever had regrets about that with other parts of your life? How about parts of your life such as going out, being adventurous, and doing things with girls? I’m sure you do because everyone wishes they knew today for when they were in high school or college. Youth is wasted on the young (and wealth is wasted on the old).

Life is meant to be lived. This does incorporate ambition in your employment or business-building. You only have one life so give it a try. The ‘enjoy the decline’ mentality is the belief that you should just give up because the game is rigged. It’s a loser attitude.

You remember that movie Rudy? I always remember the caretaker of the field. He was an older black guy. He reveals that he was a player but ‘gave up’ because he got an attitude that he wasn’t being played because he was black. If Rudy was in the 1970s, this guy was probably in the 1950s or 1940s. He might have very well been correct that he was benched because he was black. Or he might not have been. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he allowed the attitude to go into his heart, and he flat out gave up.

Consider our ancestors. There was no Golden Age. Their daily lives had wars, plagues, and massive technological upheavals interfering. Many people think computers and the Internet was a ‘massive change’ only because they haven’t seen anything else. Consider the invention of the automobile and how it transformed civilization. Consider the widespread use of electricity which is only slightly over a century old. Their lives had far more turmoil than ours do today. Did they ‘enjoy the decline’? No. They lived. They even had children. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.

I don’t think the author of Enjoy the Decline did so because of ‘impossible macro-economics’. He tried hard in school and in his job and wasn’t successful. Since his hard work was unfulfilled, he surmises that everyone’s work will be unfulfilled too.

In my industry, the oil industry, they get bombarded by ‘economists’ and ‘geologists’ who keep saying that because of the unicorn myth of ‘Peak Oil’, we should ‘enjoy the decline’. They give them the middle finger and begin fracking, begin using carbon dioxide to dissolve rock, begin getting methane ice from the ocean floors, or whatever. In a few short years, these oil people become very wealthy and retired (for real retired). Texas, itself, has half of all the oil rigs in the nation and a quarter of all the oil rigs in the world. It is no wonder that the state is bursting at the seams in growth and that Houston has become the top exporting city in the United States.

Enjoy the decline? Enjoy the decline!? Hell no. Perhaps my views are tempered by a different geographical location as I am seeing nothing but BOOM, BOOM, BOOM all around me. The logistics are becoming terrible for me as everyone in America is literally trying to move into my neighborhood. However, I don’t blame them because they want a better life instead of ‘enjoy the decline’ in some failing state.

Life is meant to be lived. Don’t give up on your life. Don’t believe there is ‘no way to succeed’ (so you should just go around and play all day) because the light goes out of your eyes. Keep the fire going in your soul.

You want vengeance in the face of the world? Then succeed. There is no better revenge than living well. And, no, I don’t think living like a peasant on a meager income at the prime of your life is ‘living well’.