Notes On 660 Months

If someone forwarded this to you, my name is Paul, you can read about me here. This Substack grows via word-of-mouth, so please forward to your friends. If you like this writing, you will enjoy my books Master, Minion and Raising a Thief as well as the podcast.

This week, I’ve been alive for 660 months. In over 100+ posts, I’ve written about geopolitics, money, change, and psychology. Here is a summary of both the bigger themes in the posts and my life.

On geopolitics.

1. There are closed systems and open systems. To generate wealth, open systems are much better.

Open systems are structurally flexible, like a building with protection against earthquakes. They rarely collapse (not always, Germany). Their apparent chaos (protests, bubbles, volatile political swings) is part of what creates resilience. The now-jailed Russian activist Navalny tweeted about the Biden-Trump vote, whose outcome was not immediately clear, now that’s an election! The ability to resolve disagreements, like abortion, about which people violently disagree without much violence is an open system’s strength. Closed systems are less flexible because opposition is intolerable. As a result, they struggle to adjust well to change and lack self-correcting features. That said, they can play amazing catch-up, like China’s post-Mao rebound or Russia’s post World War Two rebound. Their apparent stability is deceptive, however, something I witnessed firsthand in the 1990s watching tanks unload their ammo in downtown Moscow.  Andrew Weiss and Gao Xiqing talked about Russia and China respectively. Russia has descended into something with a whiff of 1930s Germany. Gao Xiqing describes what the Cultural Revolution was actually like, including getting hungry enough for ideas that he dug a tunnel into a library.

2. There is good and evil.

Good is our inventiveness, everything from clean water to mRNA vaccines. Some of this comes from the private sector, some from rare, bold legislation, like the 1964 Voting Rights Act. Evil is our very human capacity for violence, be that the recent alleged Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine or the roughly 1 million Americans murdered in my lifetime.  Roger Johnson talked about that.

3. Geographic luck matters.

Bad luck is being born in a place like Donbas, Ukraine. The Russians, the Germans, Stalin and the Czars all murdered locals for one state policy goal or another. People in the parts of Mississippi I traveled through and wrote about live about ten years less than people in the town I live in. Good geographic luck is being far away from the action, like Vermont, which hasn’t witnessed meaningful armed conflict in hundreds of years. In coming decades we will see tens of thousands of climate refugees, those with the terrible luck of being born close to the equator, which will get intolerably hot faster than other areas.

4. Culture matters, a lot.

The main thing that forces people out of some areas—like Central America or Russia—toward others—like Europe and the US—is culture, broadly defined. Culture is resilient but malleable. Dr. Vanuykov describes this. For instance, Russia has had a top-down, authoritarian culture with almost no meaningful history of Civil Rights for 1000 years. China has an even older culture. Even trying to figure out how to convert Chinese symbols into a keyboard is a challenge yet, of course, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also “Chinese” and adapted quite well to modernity, just as many Russian emigrants have…once they leave Russia.

(More short-term, I owe subscribers an update on Russia and China. I’ll do that soon.)

On money.

1. We are all trapped in a money cage, best to learn its dimensions and laws. Dan Zwirn talked about that. 
2. Money is unstable, we want something of it—security—that it is structurally unable to provide. Poor people can become rich and rich people frequently lose their wealth. This is because money changes shape. Someone bought a share of Peloton at $158 a share. Now Peloton trades at $11. Moreover, plenty of Peloton employees were probably granted stock options that, at a point in time, looked like they were worth something. Poof, gone. Ditto the once-valuable government bonds SVB bank bought. The key question is how to live happily given that something so essential, money, is so unpredictable if you understand how it actually works.

On social change.

At present “woke” and “China” are as evocative as “the Soviet Union” or “drugs” were when I grew up. While we don’t notice shifts day-to-day, over 50 years, the shifts are meaningful. For instance:

1. In the 1970s: no black quarterbacks, Supreme Court Justices or Presidents. Now there are. Victor and Leopold Cox talk about that.
2. In the 1970s: gay was spoken of in whispers, like “I think he is gay.” Now it’s not uncommon to see people of the same gender holding hands and kissing.
3. In the 1970s: I got my news from The Washington Post and CBS News. Now I ingest a flurry of different sources, too many to count.
4. In the 1970s: you could be arrested for marijuana possession. Now weed is essentially legal.
5. In the 1970s: the Soviet Union was a feared superpower and China was under Mao. Now the Soviet Union doesn’t exist and even the CCP recognizes Mao made terrible mistakes. Harvard Professor Yuhua Wang talks about that.

On psychology.  

1. Life is hard work. Doing anything meaningful requires enormous effort. Most everyone around you is working hard and feels like they are carrying a boulder on their shoulders. Sometimes the work is more left-brained—like analyzing investments or unpacking a plot, like my fictional character Nick in Master, Minion. Sometimes the work is much more right-brained, like learning to better listen to your spouse, something I wrote about in Raising a Thief.
2. Health is wealth. The ingredients are warm, friendly, trusting relationships (the more the better), sleep, exercise, not a lot of food (mostly fish and vegetables), no alcohol or drugs, low stress, and financial security. My wife Marina spoke about that, as did, from another angle, Matt Reynolds. Of course, these goals are paradoxical. Gaining financial security often induces stress, at least it does for me.
3. Better lucky. Over this time, I’ve had friends who died early from car accidents, shot by a jealous lover, an avalanche, and cancer. David Linden describes this. I know many people with otherworldly talents—an NBA star, a billionaire investor, a great writer. Of course, Pat, the basketball star, worked hard but he was also born lucky, a gigantic man with great coordination.

On creativity.

1. True creativity is intrinsic and comes from somewhere above or outside and flows through us. Dmitry Bykov talked about that. Below is a picture I took recently the Atacama desert in Chile. These drawings are thousands of years old. Even in shockingly limited circumstances and short life spans, the artists felt the deep need to create these paintings, just as we all do to pursue whatever creative endeavor we pursue, be that writing this post or gardening or cooking a good meal.

 

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