Munger Comments via Bloomberg

[gcgang]

Munger Says Prepare for Harder World as Buying Power Slides - Bloomberg Business

Is this newsworthy? Newsflash: currency loses purchasing power.

[CaliforniaMan]

Efficiency should vastly improve in 50 years. From my perspective the poor now live about as well as the middle class of 50 years ago, except they also enjoy better food, better medical care, the internet, more TV stations, cell phones, cherries in every season, etc etc that were not even available back then. With almost everything able to be be done more efficiently, more automated, more productively now and into the future it is hard to see how things will be more difficult. This sounds more like the population bomb, end of oil, famines etc predicted in the 1970s that should have happened long before now. Sure people will have to learn new things, and forget some old ones, but this is progress. Can't fathom why people keep predicting a bleaker future, when for centuries it has only gotten better.

[daylatedollarshort]

It would not be that expensive today to live like what was probably considered middle class in the 1950s - one car, 1K sq ft house, one TV, one landline phone, no Starbucks, no 70 pieces of new clothes per year per person. Plane fares seemed expensive then. I don't recall people I knew ever flying around much. Most of the families I knew growing up took driving vacations.

[FANOFJESUS]

After these 2000's I believe this with no trouble.

[daylatedollarshort]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CaliforniaMan Efficiency should vastly improve in 50 years. From my perspective the poor now live about as well as the middle class of 50 years ago, except they also enjoy better food, better medical care, the internet, more TV stations, cell phones, cherries in every season, etc etc that were not even available back then. With almost everything able to be be done more efficiently, more automated, more productively now and into the future it is hard to see how things will be more difficult. This sounds more like the population bomb, end of oil, famines etc predicted in the 1970s that should have happened long before now. Sure people will have to learn new things, and forget some old ones, but this is progress. Can't fathom why people keep predicting a bleaker future, when for centuries it has only gotten better.

I've posted this link before, so please skip it if you may have read it already, but it fits in exactly with what you posted:

"The question Keynes set out to solve was how humanity would adapt to a world of abundance. “He saw two options,” explains Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. “One was that we could consume ever more goods. Or we could enjoy more leisure.....By and large, we have chosen door number one."

"In the United States, the economic problem that organizes many of our lives is not that we don’t have enough. It’s that we don’t have quite as much as those who have more. That’s an economic problem that, almost by definition, can never be solved."

Keynes was, incredibly, right about the future. He was wrong about how we’d be spending it. - The Washington Post