[extropy-chat] American Humanists Association 2004 conference report - complete!

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Wed, 12 May 2004, BillK wrote:

> Do some googling on inflation-corrected indexes and you will find that
> the inflation-corrected S&P 500 Index shows a compound annual return of
> 1.46 percent per year over the 125 years from 1871 to 1996.

Bill, rather than get into some in depth economic debates over the numbers
I used, whether past depressions, wars, etc. can be applied to future
performance, whether past money fund managers or government officials
could perform as well as officials in today's environments with things
like Excel and sophisticated econometric models -- I'll simply state
that as the world and the tools evolve one always has to ask questions
with respect to whether historical performance can be used as a good
predictor of future performance.  And given the variables -- I'm not
really sure I could say.

So I simply extended the sheet using 1.46% and one still ends up being
a millionaire by the time ones age reaches 390.

So unless one makes a very strong argument for some type of economic
contraction (deflation???) which cannot be dealt with by smart money
managers who understand the concept of selling short the argument
still has a fair amount of merit.  Also deflation could do some really
strange things to "real" returns (and is someting one needs to keep
in mind if nanotech really starts to take off).  IMO, to do this reasonably
one probably needs some strategy of rotating fund managers to pick up
those who seem to best understand the local conditions and best strategies
to deal with them.

Robert