The following is a brief, contemporary account of our world, which we call, for obvious reasons, the Amazon Dystopia. I leave it undated -- Nadir.


The dystopia is most evident in the control of the working class. During work and commuting time all workers are mandated to wear a “health watch”, a wristband that monitors their movement. The wristbands also tell the time and weather. Workers also wear “world view” collars and glasses equipped with biometrics and a 360 degree video display to determine the level of their exertion, and where they are fixing their gaze. The collars can generate electric impulses to encourage workers. If they fail to perform, there is summary dismissal. The government has recently added a worker-terminating explosive charge if workers are found engaging in treasonous behavior – which includes “robust criticism or a marked lack of enthusiasm.”

Cocking and the Rise of the Plutocrats

The elections are determined by majority vote, but the people’s choice becomes the tool of the wealthy once ascending to office. This transformation is known as “cocking”. This is an unfortunate play on the Koch name, but one that is not classified as robust criticism.

Cocking was first revealed in the Washington Post, which reported that the Koch brothers, a center of corporate political power, presented various incumbents with a check made out to their opponent for $25 million, with the threat that the check would be handed over to the opposition if the incumbent did not act in what the Koch brothers considered to be the best interests of the country. The threat only had to be made good one time, and the story planted for the Washington Post team to uncover, (with a Pulitzer for their efforts), before compliance to the threat became absolute.

The Consolidation of Power: From the One Percent to the One
The cocking grew, and political power became increasingly consolidated with those with the deepest pockets, until it finally has become a plutocracy of one. And having power over the press has helped to correctly frame the new order for the masses. At least the small subset of the masses that is not placated by free, unlimited streaming of videos and music.

From Each According to His Need

A value-added tax is now a primary source of revenue. Essentials such as food, clothing, and school supplies pass through a taxation station, the “fulfillment center”. Its operation is based on extensive records of every citizen, both their biometrics, gazing patterns, queries, social interactions, and of course consumption history, to infer their preferences, to the end of taxing them more highly on their purchases based on the algorithmic determination of how much they need them. This principle is promoted with the slogan, “from each according to his need.” All purchases are made with the certification of the buyer that they will not resell or redistribute, with the delivery chain iron clad from the fulfillment center to the consumer's doorstep to reduce the risk of missteps.

Luxury goods by definition are not needed, and therefore generally are exempt from taxation.

To Each According to His Abilities

The tax is paid to the agency that is responsible for the building and maintaining of this distribution system. This payment is tax exempt, because it already is a tax. The agency is in private hands because the government has determined to leave to business those things that it can do best, as measured by the profit they can extract. Thus the slogan, “to each according to his abilities.” As has been noted in various recent Washington Post articles, this is the most sure way of adding to the economy, and thus to the wealth of all individuals.

The Revolt of the Masses

Note by the conveyor of this account: As with any dystopia there is a plucky, fearless group that is fighting back. Led by Kadir and his former-rival-but-now-lover Sabella, a beautiful woman who is good with knives, this group is bringing in others to fight against the tyranny of the plutocracy.

Note by the second conveyor of this account: They are discovered and killed. The end.

In three years Tesla will be rolling out the fastest production car in the world. And not a "production car" as in, we made ten or so of these so it can be called one. No, a production car that rolls off of an assembly line — though I hope the rate of production is controlled with DeBeers-like style — and that still outperforms any car you can buy at any price.

The Tesla Roadster that was unveiled this weekend and is slated for delivery in 2020 is not only better, it is in a different league in terms of its performance specs when compared to any car at any price. Including, for example, the 1500 hp Bugatti Chiron, which starts at $2,998,000. The Roadster does zero to sixty in under two seconds (no other car is even built with the idea it can beat two seconds), a quarter mile in under nine seconds (no other car is even close to nine seconds). Top speed of over 250 mph. (It might be ten or twenty mph shy of the record here, we will have to see. Musk has said once it gets into production, the performance might exceed what we are seeing with the prototype. For now we just know it is "over 250 mph".) Plus, it seems to be user-friendly. Obviously it is quiet. And it seats four, at least if two of the four are small.

And, its best-in-the-world performance in terms of speed and acceleration will not even be the headline item when it gets its test-drive reviews. I predict that the Tesla Roadster will take corners unlike any car built today. First of all, it has a lower center of gravity because of its batteries. Second, it can have the distribution of that weight precisely tuned because the batteries can be placed most anywhere on the underbelly. And third, with a separate motor for each of the rear tires, the Tesla can have a computer assist that keeps the car from skidding out as you take a corner. Anyone who has tried to make a Tesla S skid on wet or icy roads already knows this. Imagine what happens when you are speeding around a turn and the computer can differentially send more torque to one tire versus the other.

And, this is only the beginning. As Musk has pointed out, by the time the car is in production there will doubtlessly be further improvements. And even then, it is only Version 1.0. The bigger point is that an electric car is a better technology than the gas-powered car. Over time the gas-powered car will have to yield.

Already, two days after the announcement, I have been reading the reaction from the aficionado of high-end sports cars, supercars, and, as the Bugatti and its kin are called, hypercars. The basic argument is: "There is more to a sports car than how fast it goes. It is the workmanship. The feel of the car shifting gears. The sound of the engine growling. The melding of man and machine." It is the laudable appreciation of these finer points that is behind the market for mechanical timepieces. They cannot be as accurate, but they embody the workmanship of great craftsmen; the feel of winding the spring; the sound of the mechanism ticking; the melding of man and machine (I guess).

So it will be for the exquisitely crafted cars of today, from the Ferrari to the Bugatti. If we take performance as the objective, the best car in the world will no longer be one that is one or two or three million dollars. It will, at least for a time, be the two hundred thousand dollar Tesla. And after that, it will be another electric car. Like fine timepieces, the supercars of today will be admired and owned not for superlative performance, but for an appreciation of their workmanship and their mechanical intricacy.

...An Actuary is someone who wanted to be an accountant but didn't have the personality for it....An introverted actuary stares at his own feet, and extroverted one stares at the other person's feet....What is the difference between God and an actuary? God doesn't think he is an actuary...."Look at the white horses over there." Actuary: "They're white on this side, anyway."

Unfortunately, when it comes to the mess our pensions are in, actuaries are no joke. Pension funds labor under actuarial assumption for expected returns that are mainly pulled out of thin air without any regard for financial economics. Does anyone really think pensions will be able to grow at seven percent or more per annum? When they are constrained by their various constituents to hold 50% to 60% in bonds and cash? (See Figure 3 of this OECD publication.)

Those unrealistic assumptions lead to unsupportable levels of contributions, and thus pensions are underfunded as a matter of course. You know the assumption are wrong when virtually every pension is on the negative side of the ledger. But the actuaries do not seem to have been trained in the concept of making course corrections. Nor do they educate themselves in financial economics to better evaluate the mess they are creating.

Why am I going into this? Over the weekend I attended an event honoring a former colleague of mine from my days at Morgan Stanley, Jeremy Gold. He is an actuary who has spent his career trying to move the pension actuaries toward a firmer foundation in financial economics -- to have them at least avail themselves of what financial economists can provide. In the mid-1980's, Jeremy and I worked together in the Fixed Income Research Group at Morgan Stanley. He and I went on various trips to push fixed income products, and to market the fledging new strategy of portfolio insurance (flying out once to have dinner with the head of the Port Authority of Los Angeles, who we discovered, part way through the first course, had -- surprise -- thought we were selling port insurance). We co-authored a paper in 1988, In Search of the Liability Asset, that is still on various reading lists, maybe not for actuaries, but at least for those in finance.

Jeremy left Morgan Stanley in the late 1980's to get a Ph.D. from Wharton, and spent the next twenty years as a thorn in the side of the actuarial profession, pushing them to add financial and economic structure to their methods. One of the best and most widely read of his works for this is the paper Reinventing Pension Actuarial Science.

At the base of it, finance is not actuarial science. It is not predicated on repeatable, or even known, probabilities. There is no appeal to the law of large numbers for the systematic risks of the financial system.The future does not look like the past. There are no mortality tables for asset returns.

...What do actuaries and Packer fans have in common? They both think that history will repeat itself...

So if you want to be the arbiter for over 20 trillion of U.S. pension assets, a good start is to do it based upon a foundation in finance.

What will be the longest-term damage of the Trump era? A strong, principled leader will restore some semblance of decency and ethics. Foreign governments might view this period as a bad dream, or an outlier event that veered the U.S. away from a now-returning normal. The anti-scientfiic and pro-industry biases in the various departments and agencies can be rectified just as quickly as they were enacted.

There has been plenty of discussion of where the long-term damage might be on the world stage; the new path governments and businesses are taking toward China -- this might have been inevitable, and Trump has been nothing more than an accelerant; the move toward center stage of China and Germany as world leaders.

But within the U.S. the long-term damage will be more subtle. It will be the loss of the oral tradition, of institutional memory, in our government. That is, the loss of processes and interactions that are conveyed by word of mouth and by example as opposed to by written instructions.

The U.S. Treasury is a case in point. I worked there after the financial crisis, helping draft the Volcker Rule, setting up the risk management structure to get information up to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and building an agent-based models to help assess financial instabilities. I just went back to the Treasury for the first time since the start of the year to find that is has been gutted. This is not something that is on many people's minds, but it has implications that will be felt far beyond the time that a new administration comes on the scene that wants to return the department to a more normal state.

The reason, in a nutshell, is that what the Treasury does -- and what, for that matter the State Department, a department that is in even worse shape, does -- is not in any manuals. It is set on a foundation of what might be called oral tradition. People know how things work, how to get things done, and if the keepers of the oral tradition leave, it all has to start back up from scratch.

When a new administration comes in, it is the normal course of business for all the appointees to be replaced. Generally the new appointees come from outside government, and have not had previous experience in the Treasury. They rely on the staff, which mostly stays from one administration to the next. They know the process for getting things done, for developing and administering policy.

The Treasury is not a regulator per se, but it tends to be the center of communication -- and the referee when necessary -- for the agencies that do have regulatory authority: the SEC, FDIC, CFTC, etc. There is a process that has been honed over many administrations for doing this job, for acting as the central switchboard for dealing with financial issues. What happens when the switchboard operators walk out the door, and there is no operation manual to leave behind?

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?