Day: September 6, 2008

I was reading an editorial in the Fortune magazine dated September 15, written by Geoff Colvin, entitled “Brains vs. Brawn.” He was pointing out the way that raw materials and low-tech, mass-produced commodities (e.g. gold, petroleum, steel, food) have been massively outperforming knowledge-based, intensely engineered/designed/creative products (e.g. computer chips, luxury automobiles, movies) in terms of prices, over the last decade. He argues that despite this, he remains committed to an apparently earlier elaborated prediction that over the long-term, knowledge-based products are a much better investment prospect.
I’m not an economist. I’m an English teacher in Korea, with a training in linguistics and Spanish Golden Age literature. But I adamantly disagree. I think it should be obvious that over the real long term, commodities will always go up in price, but there is no such clear guarantee with respect to the prices of intellectual property (i.e. knowledge-based products). The reason is simple: we will not ever run out of the products of our intellects, collectively speaking. There is no underlying scarcity. You can keep making more ideas, art, designs, inventions, indefinitely. It’s historically cumulative. Meanwhile, commodities are physical things, and we are en route to running out, if not right away, eventually, for everything: gold, oil, iron, food.  Or whatever.
It seems elementary that the solution to reconciling the conflict between market capitalism’s requirement for never-ending growth and the world’s evident physical limits is to always increase the “knowledge” component of our economic activity, while limiting and creatively reducing our need for and consumption of physcial commodities of all kinds. The additional advantage of this process, which comes almost as a side-effect, is that people seem actually to prefer “knowledge-based” (i.e. creative) labor. This is the inevitable rise the creative classes.
But from a strictly “futures” – which is to say, investing – standpoint, it seems to me that the place to make bets is on those same commodities that I believe so strongly we should be working to limit the consumption of.  And, to reference that very much under-appreciated, 19th century, amateur economist, Henry George, all commodities and therefore all our society’s future wealth comes from the control of real estate (broadly interpreted to include oceans and even “outer space” in today’s day and age).  George used this to argue that land was the only thing the state should or could legitimately tax.  I’m not sure I agree–I don’t completely understand it.  But it makes a weird kind of sense.
The picture is of a waterfall near my mother’s home in Australia. A taxable waterfall?