A look at growing patterns consumers and businesses are adopting as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Topics covered include:
- Two constants in a radically unpredictable world
- How removing things is more powerful than adding things
- How airline travel will change, leading to more local travel
- Why bicycle sales are soaring
- How our social interactions are changing
- What is local maxima
- How the forces of money, trust, technology, and climate change have played out in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Show Notes
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thinking of Buying a Bike? Get Ready for a Very Long Wait, Christina Goldbaum—The New York Times
Good Enough Versus Even Better by Frank Wilczek—The Wall Street Journal
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Coronavirus and the Financial Impact of Pandemics
How To Survive the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Shutdown
Transcript
Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I’m your host, David Stein. Today is episode 299. It’s titled, “Has the Pandemic Changed You?”
What Doesn’t Change
My investment approach is to focus on things that don’t change. We live in a highly unpredictable world. And what doesn’t change, what is constant, is an endless surprise and human emotions.
We don’t really know what’s going to happen. With the economy. With financial markets. With monetary policy. With the pandemic. The world is a constant series of endless surprises, both good and bad.
And then, as things happen that we and others don’t anticipate, we emotionally react to them. And often overreact to those surprises. We become fearful and greedy. Asset bubbles can form, while other asset categories might get too cheap.
This pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic, has been a major shock to me, and I think, to most people. We certainly didn’t anticipate it, and now we’re coping with a dramatically different world.
In previous episodes I’ve discussed the economic, monetary, and investment impact of the pandemic and its aftermath. In this episode, I want to focus on how this seat change has impacted us personally.
Three Emerging Patterns
I see three patterns that are emerging. Two of which I’ve discussed in an earlier episode of the podcast, episode 197, “The Power of Less and Local.” These three emerging patterns are less, local, and leap.
Less. It’s a principle I’ve discussed a lot. Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Skin in the Game, talked about a principle called “via negativa.” He wrote that, “knowledge grows by subtraction. By identifying things that aren’t working and removing those things.” He says, “the act of removing is powerful and less error-prone than acting by addition.” As we’ve been isolated, locked-down in our homes, it’s given us time to think about the things that we have and do we really need them.
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