Alvin Toffler on past and future

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it.  True.  But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it.  And that could be worse.

~ Alvin Toffler

Phil Duffy on the future

History is not set in stone.  The future is not predetermined by the past.  History is made by the decisions of individuals.  There are social, there are economic, there are political, there are all kinds of other forces at work that no doubt shape human history and shape our collective actions.  But ultimately, human beings are free and rational individuals who can discern the good, who can freely choose the good, or can choose to pursue other paths.  

So, my advice is to remember that the future is not set in stone.  The future really depends on what we do now.  And I think all of us want to wake up in ten, twenty, thirty years and be able to tell the next generation that we stood up and did everything in our power – regardless of the outcome – to make sure that we were handing on a world to them that was humane, that was livable, that was just, and that was free.

~ Phil Duffy

Kevin Duffy on the predictive value of financial markets

Most times financial markets are vaguely right, sometimes wildly wrong.  The key to successful investing is recognizing the difference.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, August 19, 2023

Jim Grant on about imagining the future and thinking apart from the crowd

Just as markets are about the future, if you can't know the future you must contribute something to the difficult but necessary job of imagining it.  You can dogmatize about it.  You can conceive a view of it based upon the alignment of forces in the present, about the way people themselves are expecting the future to unfold.  If everyone thinks one thought, you have an edge, because you can investigate the alternative, because often as not the idea that's most popular is the least remunerative - not always, but often.

~ Jim Grant, interview with William Green, 29:20 mark, August 20, 2022

Brian Chesky on the future of the office

I think that the office as we know it, is over.  We can't try to hold on to 2019 any more than 1950.  We have to move forward.

~ Brian Chesky, "Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who recently announced that employees could work from home forever, calls the office an 'anachronistic form' and 'from a pre-digital age'," Yahoo Finance, May 8, 2022

Kevin Duffy on prediction

The future is probabilistic, not certain.  The past is certain, but must be viewed probabilistically to have any predictive value.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, February 8, 2022

Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner on forecasting

There is plenty of room to stake out reasonable positions between the debunkers and the defenders of experts and their forecasts.  On the one hand, the debunkers have a point.  There are shady peddlers of questionable insights in the forecasting marketplace.  There are also limits to foresight that may just not be surmountable.  Our desire to reach into the future will always exceed our grasp.  But debunkers go too far when they dismiss all forecasting as a fool's errand.  I believe it is possible to see into the future, at least in some situations and to some extent, and that any intelligent, open-minded, and hardworking person can cultivate the requisite skills.

Call me an "optimistic skeptic."

~ Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting, p. 6

Lawrence Lindsey on the decade ahead

The next decade is going to be a scramble for survival.  You need to think about it that way and prepare in order to have a prosperous future.

~ Lawrence B. Lindsey, "'Currency War' with Lawrence Lindsey," Stansberry Investor Hour, 53:45 mark, August 12, 2021

Jenny Johnson: "the next decade is not going to have the same tailwinds"

We've just come off a decade where there's been massive central banks pumping money into the system. You've had interest rates at historically low levels...  You can't fall off the floor; they're probably not going  much lower.  So they're either going to stay there for a while or go up...  Look at the passive bond indexes: Their durations have expanded over the last 15 years.  That becomes a different risk.  Equity markets where 6 stocks accounted for 50% of the return in the last 10 years.  There have been great tailwinds this last decade, but I could say one thing for sure is "the next decade is not going to have the same tailwinds."  So there's going to be some real challenges there.

~ Jenny Johnson, Franklin Templeton CEO, Yahoo Finance interview, July 14, 2021

Albert Einstein on imagining the future

Imagination is everything: It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

~ Albert Einstein

Peter Drucker on prediction

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

~ Peter Drucker

Tom Slater on growth investing and prediction

Many people are focused on trying to predict economic variables.  They are inherently extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict.  At the same time, there are a lot of predictable trends—in communications, computation, machine learning, energy generation and storage, gene sequencing, and synthetic biology.  We focus on predictable trends and the opportunities they create.

~ Tom Slater, "Why Moderna, Illumina, or Meituan Could Be the Next Tesla Stock," Barron's, June 18, 2021

Charles de Vaulx on the future

Only God knows the future and he ain't telling us.

~ Charles de Vaulx, R.I.P.

Charles de Vaulx
1962-2021

Cathie Wood: "We've never seen this amount of change at the same time in history"

What's fascinating about this period is that now we're seeing a flood of IPOs, a flood of secondaries, we've seen SPACs, which really are liquidity events earlier than otherwise might have taken place, because I think there's a collective understanding that the future is here.  And if we don't invest now, we're going to lose out...  So we've got five platforms, 14 different technologies.  We've never seen this amount of change at the same time in history.

~ Cathie Wood, "A typical day for Ark Invest's star stock picker Cathie Wood," Yahoo!Finance, 3:10 mark, February 6, 2021

Richard Ebeling on the coming decade and challenge for freedom lovers

The United States starts this third decade of the 21st century with a new Democratic Administration coming into the White House and possibly dominating Congress, depending upon two Senatorial runoff elections in Georgia. But whether there is a Democratic-controlled federal government or a divided government with the Republicans holding a slim majority in the Senate, the worst of the collectivist fads and fashions will be pushed over the coming years. Climate change-based controls and centralized planning will be pushed aggressively; demands will be made for more regulation of business in the name of “social justice” and corporate “social responsibility;” calls will be made for increased taxes on “the rich” and not so rich to cover more of the redistributive plunder games that are the mother’s milk of political power and privilege; race and gender warfare will be ratcheted up on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, and the shop floors of private enterprises, great and small. 

[...]

In other words, there appears to be a groundswell of economic ignorance and stupidity facing us, and even more than usual. What this means for friends of freedom and practitioners of sound, free market economics, however, is a need to redouble our efforts, and not wallow in despair and disappointment. Bad policies inescapably bring about undesirable and counterproductive effects. But their very failures can serve as openings to more reasonable and rational policies looking to the future. If these are to have a chance, the case has to be made for a freer and more open society. That requires all of us to not turn away from this challenge as this new year and this new decade begin.

~ Richard Ebeling, "Freedom versus Paternalism in the Coming Decade," AIER.org, January 3, 2021

Karen Kwiatkowski on the state, youth and their future

One of the worst things that can happen to a state is to appear ridiculous.

Especially in the eyes of the young, who have had their expectations disappointed, their plans disrupted by mandate, their elders shown to be idiotic and frightened, their government greedy, avaricious, sadistic.

The state itself has assisted the liberty movement, with its lumbering broad-brush sadism. It far prefers physical destruction, marches and riots, police brutality and the outright rage of its citizens to the cuts of a thousand poems – and 40 million awakening children who suddenly become aware that the King is buck naked, ugly, angry, vile, and simultaneously weak and wasted.

At this point, students can still walk away, and experiment with disobedience to the state, test the boundaries of what may be allowed, test state relevance to their own lives. They are being presented with a wild kind of freedom many have not yet experienced, nor even dreamed. Regardless of what they do, the future is theirs, and I expect great things.

~ Karen Kwiatkowski, "Misty Poets," LewRockwell.com, September 2, 2020

John Doerr on big tech trends of the future

Barron's: What are the big tech trends that investors ought to watch today?

John Doerr: About every dozen years in the tech world there is a tsunami—a huge wave of disruption. I have been fortunate to witness three, and I’ll predict the fourth. In the 1980s, it was the microchip and personal computer. The biggest winners were Intel and Microsoft [MSFT]. Then came the internet wave, which created winners such as Amazon.com and Google. Mobile was the next wave; Apple’s iPhone was launched in 2007. We’re almost at the end of that wave. The next one will be artificial intelligence, or AI, which will build on the three prior waves. It will be even larger.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are unlocking capabilities that previously were unthinkable. Autonomous vehicles are one example, but AI will be used to improve health care, better understand language and knowledge, improve fraud detection, make systems more secure, and much more.

~ John Doerr, "John Doerr on Leadership, Education, Google, and AI," Barron's, May 5, 2018

Steve Jobs on vision

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

~ Steve Jobs

Jeffrey Tucker on a post-coronavirus future

People predict a world of virtual meetings going forward.  No chance.  Once this madness ends, no one will want to be on another one for many many years.  Even I'm gagging at screen time, and virtual meetings?  Sick of them all.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, tweet, April 7, 2020

Jim Grant on dealing with a complex, uncertain future

The scale of government response is something new. So these things are unprecedented and so one must be very careful about drawing lessons from the past....

But for me, the lesson I have learned, or reinforced, is that … I’m going to quote a screenwriter from Hollywood... William Goldman, who I think wrote Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, apropos of the predictability of box-office receipts, William Goldman, from his lips fell one of the great quotations pertaining to all attempts at forecasting and prognostication.

“Nobody knows anything.”

We can know tendencies. We can observe patterns of behavior. We can project. So what the events of the past, the violent events of the past two weeks, have reinforced to me is the necessary humility to stay relatively diversified, relatively liquid and to choke down any thought that begins to resemble certitude. We can’t be immobilized by our ignorance of the future.

We can understand how complex the future is and how predictably, indeed predictably, it can surprise you.

~ Jim Grant, "Nobody Knows Anything," interview with Albert Lu of Sprott Media, March 24, 2020