Well, of course except for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming… the science is settled the debate over and we must pay tax to gaia . . .er act now!

Unexpected Benefits: I moved out of my family home when I was 19, and supported myself through university working three part-time jobs. Man, those were tough times – balancing studying with working all the time. If I had to do it now, I couldn’t find the energy it took. And working those jobs merely made ends meet – I was still living in poverty. University is expensive .

The unexpected benefits? I have an almost inate ability to balance my books and manage my finances down to the penny, I realized the value of hard work early, and have never lived beyond my means. This has put me far ahead of my friends of the same age who never went through this kind of trial. Living in poverty gave me the tools it took to become wealthy.

Perverse Results: I got my Master’s degree and was immediately offered an amazing job at Nortel with a great starting salary. At 25 years old, I maxed out my RRSPs and invested it all in the company plan which had a fantastic matching program. I had about 40K invested by the time I was 27. Well, you can just imagine what that is worth now. Starting early in investing did not pan out for me at all.

Of course I made the ultimate mistake of putting all my eggs into the Nortel basket, but that’s another story. My older self wants to shake my younger self for doing that, but it was a lesson better learned while young.

I hadn’t heard that, DuckConference.

Come to think of it, though, there was something I saw once on UTube that purported to be a video of Hitler’s reaction when he heard that there was some fellow posting accurate safe withdrawal rate (SWR) numbers on the internet. It would be fair to say that he did not come across as being entirely pleased by this turn of events.

Rob

I believe that John Bogle caused the problems that President Obama is experiencing with his health reform initiative. I am 100 percent confident that this was not his intent!

Bogle is responsible for promoting Passive Investing. I believe that Passive Investing caused the huge bull. I believe that the huge bull caused the huge bear. I believe that the huge bear has made many middle-class people fearful of their economic futures and distrustful of their political leaders. Hence, many do not feel comfortable going along with as big an initiative as health reform at this time.

No one could have anticipated such a thing in advance. As is noted in the article, there are thousands of pieces to the puzzle and a change in any of the elements can affect lots of other elements. This is why making predictions is such a difficult business. To make effective predictions in either the economic or political spheres, we need to hold lots of pieces stable, and it is rarely possible to do that. If you make assumptions about how a great many things are likely to turn out (thereby making predictions on other matters possible), you are likely to be wrong about at least some of your assumptions.

We cannot give up trying to come to terms with things that affect our lives. But we need to adopt more of a humble attitude when doing so.

Rob

We don’t know what we don’t know. And one of the things we don’t know is the effect of our actions beyond the very short term. Take Social Security for example. Back when it was created, the average life expectancy was only 66 or 67. Yet today life expectancies are 20 years longer and here we are trying to figure out how to keep the system solvent (doesn’t help that the politicians spent all the money on pet projects to get themselves re-elected, either). Today, in the US, we have an oligarchy attempting to set up a healthcare system made up of politicians, doctors, nurses, patients, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, medical equipment manufacturers, hospitals, employers, taxpayers, the intentionally uninsured, and God-only-knows who else. What will be those unintended consequences?

Further, when we DO attempt to predict these consequences, our estimates are wildly erroneous, furthering the evidence that there are unintended consequences. No one debates that there are consequences, it’s the “unintended” part everyone has a problem with!

Genetic scientists formerly believed that single genes were responsible for the production of a single protein, but they’ve discovered that genes may actually work together to produce more than one protein (someone actually did the math and figured out there were more proteins than genes).

Great post. I’ve been thinking about this one for quite some time too.