Thinking long term right now is hard–which is why it’s worth doing

Vacation’s over. Sigh. But I remember…

We had just passed the solar farm—acres and acres of solar cells pointed toward the hot Puglia sun when we hit the traffic jam. A shepherd and his two dogs were guiding about 100 sheep down the road and that had stopped traffic—all two cars of it. We were on our way to lunch in Mesagne where nothing much has happened, it seems from the architecture, since the eighteenth century, and then on to Manduria to look at the remains of the great stone walls the Messapians had built around 700 B.C. to protect them from the pesky Greek newcomers.

Italy makes you think in long runs of years. Here’s a road that once connected Otranto, then the great eastern port of the empire, with Rome and now a town where the dock area is an Italian version of Ocean City, Maryland. Here Domenico, our host for two weeks at the agriturismo Serra Gambetta near Bari, apologizes because his oldest olive trees—still producing—go back only 400 years. And over the border in Basilicata, the cave houses built in the soft cliffs for protection back in the Middle Ages, are now being reclaimed as shops and hotels.

The perspective is useful in today’s stock market.

No, I’m not going to preach some thread-bare advice about investing for the long run. Nor am I going to tout the shares of an up and coming asteroid miner or of a vineyard on the slopes (the lower slopes) of Olympia Mons.

But I do think it’s important to think about time in relation to the current market.

Right now the stock market is hung up on the short term.

Will the U.S. economy slow significantly in the second half of 2010? Is the current slowdown in growth just the normal slump that characterizes many recoveries when companies have finished rebuilding inventories that were drawn down during the recession and that boost to buying disappears? Is the decline in home prices near an end? Will companies start hiring by the end of the year?

All important questions—if you’re trying to hit quarterly performance numbers or catch the exact bottom in the market.

But not so important if you’re investing for five years or longer.   Continue reading Thinking long term right now is hard–which is why it’s worth doing

1491 will let you see the New World that we’re just starting to discover

Happy Europeans discover the New World even though none of the people who lived there then knew that they needed finding Day.

I don’t mean to disparage Columbus. As a history such as Hugh Thomas’ Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan (2005) makes clear, the man was an amazing sailor. Getting across the Atlantic in 1492 was no mean feat.

Ever since that “discovery” first European and then U.S. culture has struggled to see what Columbus found. The early European explorers wanted to believe that the peoples who lived in the lands that Columbus discovered were savages and cannibals. Those categories made it easy to see the native peoples as either subjects to be ruled or enemies to be exterminated.

We haven’t gotten a whole lot better at seeing in the last four hundred plus years. In school I was taught U.S. history in a way that made native societies background for the important actions that formed The Story of the American People. In college and after I learned how to see these native peoples as victims and to mourn their passing.

It hasn’t really been easy to understand the full inadequacies of those ways of seeing until the last few decades. It turns out that we didn’t know very much about these people and their societies and their achievements. That’s been gradually changing as scientists have chipped away at our profound ignorance about the world in this hemisphere before Columbus.

If you want to get caught up on the best of that science, in a story told with real passion for what we’re learning, then devote a bit of this Columbus Day weekend to starting 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

I dare you to read this book and not be moved, outraged, intrigued, and amazed by what we are now beginning to know that we didn’t know for so long.

What kinds of things?   Continue reading 1491 will let you see the New World that we’re just starting to discover

Did the United States prosper because of or inspite of its leaders?

The great stock picker and mutual fund manager Peter Lynch once advised, “Buy businesses so simple even an idiot could run them. Because one day an idiot will.”

After reading David S. Reynolds’s Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (HarperCollins, 2008), I can’t help wondering if the same thing applies to countries.

Call it Manifest Destiny. Or the workings of God’s hand. Or the inevitable workings of capital and labor. Or an idea so simple even an idiot couldn’t mess it up.

But there’s got to be some reason why the United States survived the first half of the nineteenth century despite the rather shaky quality of its leaders. And the somewhat uncertain character of the average citizen, for that matter.

If you like your history strong on armies marching over the landscape or are fascinated by accounts of who skunked who in the smoke-filled back rooms, then this isn’t the book for you.

But if you read history because you enjoy the details that give a period character, that make the past different from the present, then this is your book. Because that’s exactly the parts of the story that Reynolds finds fascinating and brings to life.

Take, for example, the fact that the average American spent most of the years between the war of 1812 and the end of Andrew Jackson’s presidency in 1837 constantly inebriated if not outright drunk.   Continue reading Did the United States prosper because of or inspite of its leaders?

The past isn’t what it seems: The more you know about France the more this quirky history will amaze you

When we divide the world into developed and undeveloped economies, we should remember how very recent all of what we call development is.

When we marvel at—or doubt–the speed at which China or India or Brazil is becoming developed, we should remember that what is now called the developed world did it just as quickly.

That’s the message of Graham Robb’s amazingly quirky history The Discovery of France (Picador, 2007). Robb attempts, and large succeeds, at that most difficult of imaginative acts: he makes us see a history that we think we know as the story of a strange land full of marvels. (By the way the book is just an amazing amount of fun as well.)

The past, Robb points out, isn’t filled with people just like us. Indeed while the gap in years is small—just 250 years of so—the world of 1750 and 1850 and even 1900 is often unrecognizable to those who live in the developed economies of 2009.

Robb’s subject happens to be France. As a prize winning biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, it’s a country he knows well and one he clearly loves. But the history he writes could be written of much of the now developed world.

And it’s a strange history indeed.

Consider that

• The effort to draw first complete and reliable map of France dates back to just 1740. The first sheet of Cassini’s great map was published in 1750; the last was printed in 1815.
• In 1777 it took 37,000 (unpaid workers) and 22,000 horses (presumably fed if not paid) seven days to build 22 miles of road in the Rouen region.   Continue reading The past isn’t what it seems: The more you know about France the more this quirky history will amaze you

Montalban’s detective novels: Remembrance of Barcelona’s past

In most mystery novels the detective is the star in the spot light and the city, country house, deserted moor, whatever is atmosphere, the source of clues, scenery.

Manual Vazquez Montalban’s detective novels reverse that relationship. His plots are almost non-existent. His detective Jose ‘Pepe’ Carvalho doesn’t do much of anything. At least not in the two novels I’ve read and recommend to you, Offside (1988) and An Olympic Death (1991). (Admittedly, a small sample out of the 22 Carvalho novels Montalban wrote.)

Ah, but Montalban has set his novels in Barcelona, the city where he was born in 1939. (He died in 2003.)

And who needs another star when he has Barcelona?   Continue reading Montalban’s detective novels: Remembrance of Barcelona’s past