The last time I wrote was July 26, 2019. (Yes, I posted someone else essay on Aug 8, 2019 that I did not write.)

I have been spending the time in continuous education and I have learnt new knowledge and relearn some knowledge that I would like to share with you all.

Hans Rosling, Swedish, wrote Factfulness. Wonderful book, full of data and nice bubble graphs. There are many jewels and one that we all should know is about babies and religions, my prejudice stands corrected that average babies per woman is independent of religion. From the book, Factfulness are the two illustrations:

And here is Iran:

Do listen to him, https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies?language=en, now it is so fortunate of technology as he has passed on in 2017. But his legacy will be continued by his son, Ola and daughter-in-law, Anna.

Another author that I would like to introduce to you is Jared Diamond (US) who wrote -Guns, Germs and Steel (GGS), Collapse and the latest Upheaval and many more. I did not read GGS, but Collapse and now reading Upheaval. Excellent books on why communities collapse and how some nations cope with crises.

In addition, I was introduced to Vaclav Smil (Czech) by my daughter. Yet to get his book, but his talks are most illuminating and Bill Gates consider him among his favourite authors. Here is a good introduction of him https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man-who-has-quietly-shaped-how-world-thinks-about-energy and here is his “blog” vaclavsmil.com/category/news/

And finally, the last person I want to introduce that I just recently become acquainted is Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek (Polish). Here is Wikipedia on him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Patzek and here is the link to his blog - https://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/

They are all highly educated and I would call them experts. They certainly articulate very well the precarious condition earth is in and also some of the nonsense on renewables.

Source: Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 (6): 1121–1134.

From Tad, I learnt: "In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others. " (The highlights are by Tad)

The more I educate myself, I realized that there is a lot I still do not know.

You may (rightly) ask what all these authors have to do with investing, well I also do not know precisely, but I do know now:

-          that population growth will soon tapper off; and in many countries (Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, in some order of ranking) population will soon decrease (without immigration); this should impact consumers counters in the medium / long term

-          the developed countries are using far more resources (energy) than the rest of the world on a per capita basis while on absolute terms China / India beats them and more due to the huge population, but “we forgive them” as an Indian expert said during a Davos WEF 2007 forum (do read Factfulness page 140); but population in developing countries still aspire to live like developed countries, so energy consumption will always increase while the developed countries do not want to cut back as they want to maintain their standard of living; consumptions of energy (fossil fuels, copper, iron, coal, etc) will increase and these commodities from easy to get mines are already exhausted and will have to come from deeper or less productive mines – cost will go up so will prices of these commodities sooner or later

And so on …

Happy reading / learning.