Risk Management in the Long Term

I work in a pension fund. And pension funds, as well as sovereign wealth funds -- which are like pension funds for an entire country -- need to take the long view. The liabilities can stretch out for twenty or thirty years. And a lot can happen in between. But some of this is not too hard to divine. In fact, ironically, the issues that extend to the long term are in some ways more predictable than those of the shorter term. Things like demographics, changes in demand due to the adoption of new technology, fixed income of retirement, and, unfortunately, climate change.

The thing about demographics is that you get plenty of warning. If the driving issue for risk is what twenty year-olds are up to, you get to know how many twenty year-olds you will be dealing with twenty years ahead of time. (Excluding immigration.) And, similarly, you have a pretty good head start in knowing what lies ahead as people retire, like, that they will live longer, and that there is a sizable group that does not have enough between savings (which is close to zero) and social security and pensions (which averages under $20K a year) to make a go of it.

Demographics is a slow motion tidal wave that washes over society. Look at how our institutions have changed as the baby boomers moved into school age (remember split sessions as elementary schools became overcrowded ) and then college age, and then became home buyers. And now they are moving into retirement, an age of dissaving, of heading off to Florida, and of consuming more and more health care resources. Will we soon see in reverse the housing boom that occurred when the baby boomers reached house-buying age. Will the cash strapped Millennials be able to pick up the inventory? In a time when dining rooms and living rooms are the housing equivalent of an appendix, will there be demand for what will be coming onto the market?

We don't know what lies ahead for technological innovation, but we do know the longer-term trend as the technology that we already have is improved and adopted. Jobs in transportation will shrink. Jobs generally will shrink. The oil, insurance, and auto industries will face huge disruption. The wonders of innovation will meet the realities of political will. The winner-takes-all business models, Amazon being the dominant case, will find increasing headwinds from the regulators and lawmakers.

What is true for the path of demographics is also true for climate change. We have a pretty good read on the direction, if not the magnitude, of climate change. There has been so much energy expended in fighting the pushback on whether climate change is real that we haven't had the energy to contemplate the full implications of its course. If you want to get a scary version of what can happen, read the New York Magazine article The Uninhabitable Earth. The author spoke to climate scientists about their views of the future, views that they generally do not share publicly because it is hard enough to put the simple, non-dire view out there without dodging tomatoes. The dire-view list includes, section by section in the article: heat death, the end of food, climate plagues, unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, and poisoned oceans.

Where does all this lead? To something that is more concerning (well, not as concerning as heat death, the end of food, and the rest) than the trends themselves: social revolt. The ushering in of the industrial age had its Karl Marx and its hundred years of revolution rolling across the globe. What will we see rolling across the globe when the broadly predictable demographic, retirement, employment, and climate trends take their course during the next decades? (And I haven't even discussed the implications of all of this for rising inequality and marginalization.) When we have a younger generation trying to support an older one that outnumbers it by some multiple; when it is doing so without being able to find meaningful (or just about any) jobs; where the retirees do not have the wherewithal for self support; all with the backdrop of a climate that is making the earth uninhabitable in multiple ways?