Rick Rule on the long bull market in commodities

If you look around a range of commodities over the last two decades; pick one: oil, coal, copper, nickel, even the ones that are down substantially in the last 18 months like lithium.  We are clearly in a bull cycle.  And the reasons for that are really simple: There are eight billion of us on the planet; every day there's more.  For 40 years we've done a great job lifting the poorest of the poor worldwide - 1.5 billion people - out of dire poverty, making them merely poor, as opposed to extremely poor.  Is there a lot more to be done?  Absolutely!  But we've done a great job.  The consequence of that, Lucijan, is that when poor people get more money, which has happened on a wonderful scale for 40 years - the stuff they want to buy is made of stuff.  When you and I get more money we buy some little gadget from Apple or we buy a service.  But when poor people get more money they replace a thatched roof with a metal roof, they replace mud waddle with concrete, they go from barefoot to shoes to bicycles to 55cc motorcycles to a Toyota Hylux.  And this is going on around the world.

Is the bull market going to continue?  Of course!  There's a billion people with no access to primary electricity... a billion!  There's another 2 billion people on earth with access to either intermittent or unaffordable power.  And the same can be said for calorie counts.  The same can be said for the whole range of the material standards of living.  Meanwhile, you want to live better, too.  You want your children to live better than you do.  All of this requires stuff.

~ Rick Rule, interview with Lucijan Valkovic, 5:10 mark, March 28, 2024

Kevin Duffy on Phil Duffy's new book 'A Tale of Four Cities'

To economic historians, the “hockey stick of human prosperity” is that irresistible bright shiny object. Up until 1800, the human population and living standards grew at a snail’s pace, but then a strange thing happened: both took off.

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In A Tale of Four Cities, Phil Duffy asks an intriguing question: “What if the real inflection point took place 100 years or so earlier?”  Have economic archeologists been unearthing evidence in all the wrong places?  Have they drawn false conclusions?

Challenging simple narratives often leads to valuable, contrarian insights.  By shifting the timeline of the starting gun on human progress back a century, Duffy unlocks a treasure trove.  First, he asserts that the actual dawning was the Agricultural Revolution, which laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.  Second, he discovers Richard Cantillon, the first economist to recognize the critical role of the entrepreneur in creating wealth.  Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General was written in 1730, long before Adam Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations.  Third, he makes a compelling case that Smith suppressed Cantillon’s work and removed the role of the entrepreneur, paving the way for misguided theories which treated entrepreneurship as vulgar and exploitative.

This would largely explain why many people in America, far from appreciating their good fortune, are openly hostile towards ultra-rich entrepreneurs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.  It also explains why those same billionaires give openly to anti-capitalistic charities.  It explains why so many countries have destroyed themselves by ingesting toxic theories on wealth creation, from sub-Saharan Africa, to the former Soviet Union, to Cuba and Venezuela.  It explains why governments in the West have grown to oppressive levels, threatening to strangle their productive hosts. 

If Duffy is correct, much of the world today enjoys a level of wealth unimagined by our ancestors despite worshipping false idols like Adam Smith, paper money and democracy.  Future economic progress is not a guarantee.  In fact, the human experiment appears to be at a crossroads.  Choosing the right path may just require getting the timeline right on that bright shiny object.

~ Kevin Duffy, Forward to A Tale of Four Cities, April 8, 2023