A bugbear of mine that is increasingly turning into a mission is my aversion to and desire to fight the doom and gloom that surrounds us. I am convinced that being pessimistic and gloomy is not only bad for mental health but also bad for investment performance
I think you are onto something very insightful here. I'm close to 60, and my whole adult life I've been constantly warned that everything's on the verge of collapse. But it never does. That said, I've come to realize that in our business you can't sit at the same lunch table as the cool kids if you're not a cassandra.
Ennui, incouisiance, fatalism, and derision of cheerfully optimistic people has always been a particularly upper-class affectation through history, but I observed that what had always existed as good-natured satire sending up politicians, bosses, etc. took on a very snarky and mean tone, likely beginning in the '60s and 70s but accelerating in recent decades. Exactly how things became increasingly mean-spirited and negative probably had social drivers: Better-educated and less religious, so more sceptical, people. Pop culture, notably movies moved from light drama and comedy to darker subjects such as horror and anti-heroes. But very real betrayals such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, etc. started an erosion of faith in the very instituions and authority figures who'd led us out of WWII and into post-war prosperity, which is where the long slow slide likely began. A US Vice President (somewhat ironically as he was part of an administration that was part of the whole problem in the first place) once used the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" https://politicaldictionary.com/words/nattering-nabobs-of-negativism/ .
There were also distinctly economic drivers: As newspapers lost, along with all their advertising revenues, their function as news breakers to 24-hour TV news, it became all about opinion/editorial. And we all know that "if it bleeds it leads" and "dog bites man stories are always trumped by man bites dog stories". Then in 1996, Fox News was founded explicitly as right-wing agit-prop, the prime purpose of which is to keep viewers constantly lathered up and angry about everything every day, even if it's stuff that's completely contrived. Then the internet spawned "enrage to engage" as a business model, and things really went pear-shaped.
Kids (who are naturally optimistic) grow up in environments with grumpy adults, and the cycle continues ... unless the Millenials eventually break us out of it as "hero archetypes" tend to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory .
P.S. Social interaction requires optimism, or at least polite and civil behavior, or at least one's ability to fake it ("The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -- Groucho Marx). I've never been religious, nor was I raised as such, but there had to be a defining moment when religious people said "I don't like getting up early, dressing up, going to church, sitting there petending to listen to an uplifting message, and then pretend to make cheery small-talk with neighbors and co-workers ... I think I'll just sleep in, stay home, and watch football." Now, in the old days, this might've been career suicide, or neighborhood people would talk and you'd lose status ... there were perceived social consequences that forced people to behave more optimistically. In the US, the whole millieu had a name, Boosterism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosterism , with all sorts of knock-on effects in fraternal/sororital and youth organizations. Starting in the '60s and '70s, making fun of this became a national sport, cohesion broke, and people balkanized into splinter groups that can easily no only hate each other, but today even casually talk about killing them off (as US MAGA republicans routinely do about "lib-tards"/"woke" people and immigrants) ... not a good backdrop for uplifting news :-(
What a wonderful response. I wholeheartedly agree and thank you for your thoughtful lines.
As for your comments on wanting to sit with the cool kids requiring you to become a Cassandra, all I can say is that I never was cool and I for sure don't want to be cool today. So stay tuned for more posts on optimism as the year progresses.
H.L. Mencken once said "A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” Perhaps the distinction between cynicism (corrosive) and an appropriate level of skepticism (healthy) in investment has become muddled. Being "contrarian" used to imply one who raised reasonable questions in both bull and bear markets (as Warren Buffett once said "be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy only when others are fearfull), but it's become fashionable to, especially in the face of equity markets hitting all-time highs, remain bearish all the time, hoping that one's "stopped-clock is right once a day" moment arrives ... and if it doesn't, as for weather forecasters, there's no penalty for failure. Morgan Stanley used to have the Wall Street strategist game nailed: They had a perma-bull (Barton Biggs), and a perma-bear (Byron Wien), and therefore were never wrong!
We become inured to modern developments: Last year The Economist wrote "In 1981 over 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. ... Forty years later, only 8% of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty; more than half, on some measures, count as middle class." Stocks now garner historically unthinkable market caps, but ASML just reported €9 billion in orders for its semiconductor production equipment in a single quarter, which dwarfs the annual revenues of the entire industry when I started in the business. Facebook has three billion (!) active monthly users ... ony Coca-Cola used to have numbers like that. I stumbled across a silly YouTube channel where a kid flies around visiting one-star-reviewed restaurants; he has 14 million (!) subscribers https://youtube.com/@ryan , from which he must generate a seven-figure income.
Sure, there are issues with a change from industrial to service economies, with income and wealth inequality, with the rise of nationalism and authoritarian regiemes, but every modern generation faces relentless change and must adapt and overcome ... hopefully without needing depressions or world/cold wars to do so. If we just tweaked the tax system to make it more progressive, changed healthcare systems to single-payer models, elected in some adult supervision in politics, and agreed on sensible energy mix and carbon pricing, we'd probably feel as bullish on the world as we probably felt right before what I feel was the year everything started to change from old to new 'round about 1996. Perhaps that's the eventuality the bouyant stock market is discounting.
JK argues that ‘progress’ came with the decline in ‘religion’ and advance of science - post 1850. Yes, but - before the corruption of the church in the 18th & 19th C, the foremost scientists & philosophers existed within the church. Thus change came in Northern Europe but not Asia, as JK says.
Pessimism, and now cynicism, have not led to ‘progress’ but negativity even despair, particularly post 1960.
Synthesising these, it may be that we need to value science, technology and entrepreneurship, but hold philosophical views of hope and respect for a greater whole. Meanwhile laissez faire liberalism, populism & militant Islam are antithetical to progress.
"English-speaking countries [referring to the US, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia] used to be clearly distinct from Protestant Europeans (with stronger religious affiliations) but the two groups have become harder to distinguish."
"In 1998, 38% of Protestant Europeans and 32% of Muslims said most people could be trusted. By 2022 trust in Europe had risen (with more than half of Europeans saying that they trusted people) but it had plummeted in Islamic countries, where just 15% of respondents said people are trustworthy. In 1998 Catholic Europeans and Latin Americans also had comparable levels of trust. By 2022, the proportion of Catholic Europeans who said they trusted people was three times higher than that of Latin Americans."
"In 1981, for example, 47% of Americans described themselves as non-religious (saying God was not important in their lives, that they did not attend church services and so on). The share in Sweden was 58%. By 2022 the share in America had risen by 14 points, almost matching Sweden’s. Meanwhile Orthodox, Islamic and Latin American countries have seen either smaller changes or, in some cases, movement towards more traditionalism and collectivism. That does not necessarily invalidate the idea that global values will one day converge. But it does suggest that day may be some way off."
"At a broad level, values and politics are obviously and intimately connected. Traditional values seem to be more associated with autocracies; one-person-one-vote systems embody individualistic values. It can be no coincidence that during the past decade authoritarian populists have done especially well in two of the regions where the slowdown or reversal of secular-rational values has occurred: Orthodox countries (such as Russia and Belarus) and Latin America (Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela). In Orthodox, Latin American and Islamic countries support for democracy also plummeted, as measured by the share of the population saying they thought it was good or fairly good to have a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections. In all three regions the share saying they thought this rose by between one-third and two-thirds between 1998 and 2022. That hardly bodes well for the future of democracy. Even so, there is no simple relationship between values and politics, as the example of American religious voters suggests. The persistence of the devout and traditionalist right in Europe and America is clearly connected with discontent at spreading individualism. But it is not so clear whether voters have changed and organised themselves into more powerful far-right parties, or whether the parties have simply managed more successfully than in the past to sell their politics to voters who have not changed that much themselves."
My distillation: Religion is important in shaping society ... especially in places where religion is no longer important!
I am 100% with you. And completely agree with your thoughts on the church ads holder of wisdom and science before it got corrupted. In my previous post on patience and long-term thinking I reference Deirdre McCloskey's books on Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Values. I think it is an underappreciated fact that holding science and technology in high esteem leads to progress, while holding populism and if I may add the adoration of sports stars, singers, etc. is holding us back. As Friedman (the NYT columnist, not the economist) once said: The difference between China and the US is that in the US everyone wants to be like Britney Spears, in China everyone wants to be like Bill Gates.
'why the Industrial Revolution took hold in England and Northern Europe'
The (Scottish) enlightenment revolutionized how we look at family structures: the individual became the minimal unit of society. Clearing the way for the division of labour. Add to that a lot of English coal and...
'Yet, modern conservatism has sometimes morphed into something where ‘progress’ and ‘optimism’ have become dirty words.”'
I wouldn't tie conservation-sentiments solely to conservatives, at all. While it is progressives who are falling for degrowth. Since they are, much more than conservatives, economical illiterates.
One, just one, example:
The traditionally progressive Amsterdam population was asked in a 1994 referendum 'where can the city build houses?' (The city needed and still needs tens of thousands of houses and appartments).
1 Can we build higher? Voters: no!
2 Can we build in the meadows surrounding us? (We call that nature in the Netherlands). Voters: no!
3 Can we reclaim land from a lake (the consequences would be that a few thousand birds would have to move some 2 km and float somewhere else. They would have to figure that out all by themselves...). Voters: no!
Of course some years later they were overruled, land was reclaimed and the birds now float a mile or so further away. And no one cares about nor remembers the referendum...
I find progressives hilariously conservative:
The environmental laws they've introduced the past 2, 3 generations - one funky frog can block a new neighborhood, road or industrial site (industry = bah);
Their nitrogen fundamentalism if not nihilism (the values our gov accepts are 300 x more stringent than Germany's...) prohibits the building of infrastructure and again neighborhoods;
ESG has seen p funds and asset managers leaving energy exploration and mining, making the energy 'transition' even more expensive. (The Dutch excel at this kind of cheap-as-of-now virtue signalling);
They built a windmill forest WITHOUT a matching electricity grid meaning we face a decade of electricity delivery problems and, once again, neighborhoods can't be build while industry can't expand since there is no juice (of course that's still not as bad as the UK where windmill parks face a decade + before they can connect to the grid, FGS);
And finally through democratization the opportunities for citizens 'to have their say' can delay anything for many years.
What did go fast?
Solar panel subsidies for middle class citizens;
Guaranteed prices for those citizens selling back 'their' electricity;
Subsidizing BWM and Jaguar drivers to change to Tesla;
Replacing gas fueled utility plants by subsidized local biomass plants. *
They may be economical illiterates but these progressives sure know where the money is. Perhaps because they're overrepresented in gov roles?
* You could say fossil is subsidized as well and that is true, but the motivation there is energy security. A notion completely lost on progressives it seems. But they're going to find out soon. At home and in the ballot box.
Two interesting thoughts, Joel. I detest the term ‘progressive’ because the word presupposes that there is a single clear path towards …… what? ‘Progressives’ do not say but there is a self certainty that they are morally superior. As you indicate, in ways they are regressive; and this is not a Left -v- Right issue. I am a ‘social conservative’ but never a ‘Conservative’.
Planning for Climate Change: It makes me furious, and concerned for my great grandchildren, that our ‘elite and betters’ play pretend ‘Green washing’ in the face of an existential risk. In your example (windmills far from grid) HMG should enable private capital to rebuild the national grid. Same in California where failing 70 yo pylons start wild fires.
The grid should have been taken care of at the same time wind and solar was being promoted and subsidized - 20 years ago. (While nuclear was, and often still is, iffy for many).
But windmills are photo opps, grid expansion isn't.
Oh what truth you speak. To give you some numbers, we need to invest about $17 trillion in power generation from renewables, nuclear and gas with CCS until 2050 (according to BNEF). But what often gets forgotten is that we also have to invest about $9.2 trillion in new grid infrastructure and $4 trillion in existing grid infrastructure (all figures are worldwide and in today's dollars). In essence, for every dollar invested in sexy power generation projects that provide photo ops to politicians and business leaders we need to invest some 80 cents in the boring stuff that gets the power to factories and households. It's just that grids don't make for good photo ops and so we don't invest nearly enough in that stuff.
I fear the end result will be what we see with our water infrastructure in the UK right now. Businesses will underinvest for years and decades and when it starts to fail,m they will ask the government for a bailout.
From an article in italian by NICOLÒ ADDARIO Full professor of general sociology. Teaches Theory of Social Change and Innovation and Political Communication at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
THE ORIGINS OF THE “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION” THAT ROCKED THE WORLD
I think you are onto something very insightful here. I'm close to 60, and my whole adult life I've been constantly warned that everything's on the verge of collapse. But it never does. That said, I've come to realize that in our business you can't sit at the same lunch table as the cool kids if you're not a cassandra.
Ennui, incouisiance, fatalism, and derision of cheerfully optimistic people has always been a particularly upper-class affectation through history, but I observed that what had always existed as good-natured satire sending up politicians, bosses, etc. took on a very snarky and mean tone, likely beginning in the '60s and 70s but accelerating in recent decades. Exactly how things became increasingly mean-spirited and negative probably had social drivers: Better-educated and less religious, so more sceptical, people. Pop culture, notably movies moved from light drama and comedy to darker subjects such as horror and anti-heroes. But very real betrayals such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, etc. started an erosion of faith in the very instituions and authority figures who'd led us out of WWII and into post-war prosperity, which is where the long slow slide likely began. A US Vice President (somewhat ironically as he was part of an administration that was part of the whole problem in the first place) once used the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" https://politicaldictionary.com/words/nattering-nabobs-of-negativism/ .
There were also distinctly economic drivers: As newspapers lost, along with all their advertising revenues, their function as news breakers to 24-hour TV news, it became all about opinion/editorial. And we all know that "if it bleeds it leads" and "dog bites man stories are always trumped by man bites dog stories". Then in 1996, Fox News was founded explicitly as right-wing agit-prop, the prime purpose of which is to keep viewers constantly lathered up and angry about everything every day, even if it's stuff that's completely contrived. Then the internet spawned "enrage to engage" as a business model, and things really went pear-shaped.
Kids (who are naturally optimistic) grow up in environments with grumpy adults, and the cycle continues ... unless the Millenials eventually break us out of it as "hero archetypes" tend to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory .
P.S. Social interaction requires optimism, or at least polite and civil behavior, or at least one's ability to fake it ("The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -- Groucho Marx). I've never been religious, nor was I raised as such, but there had to be a defining moment when religious people said "I don't like getting up early, dressing up, going to church, sitting there petending to listen to an uplifting message, and then pretend to make cheery small-talk with neighbors and co-workers ... I think I'll just sleep in, stay home, and watch football." Now, in the old days, this might've been career suicide, or neighborhood people would talk and you'd lose status ... there were perceived social consequences that forced people to behave more optimistically. In the US, the whole millieu had a name, Boosterism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosterism , with all sorts of knock-on effects in fraternal/sororital and youth organizations. Starting in the '60s and '70s, making fun of this became a national sport, cohesion broke, and people balkanized into splinter groups that can easily no only hate each other, but today even casually talk about killing them off (as US MAGA republicans routinely do about "lib-tards"/"woke" people and immigrants) ... not a good backdrop for uplifting news :-(
What a wonderful response. I wholeheartedly agree and thank you for your thoughtful lines.
As for your comments on wanting to sit with the cool kids requiring you to become a Cassandra, all I can say is that I never was cool and I for sure don't want to be cool today. So stay tuned for more posts on optimism as the year progresses.
H.L. Mencken once said "A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” Perhaps the distinction between cynicism (corrosive) and an appropriate level of skepticism (healthy) in investment has become muddled. Being "contrarian" used to imply one who raised reasonable questions in both bull and bear markets (as Warren Buffett once said "be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy only when others are fearfull), but it's become fashionable to, especially in the face of equity markets hitting all-time highs, remain bearish all the time, hoping that one's "stopped-clock is right once a day" moment arrives ... and if it doesn't, as for weather forecasters, there's no penalty for failure. Morgan Stanley used to have the Wall Street strategist game nailed: They had a perma-bull (Barton Biggs), and a perma-bear (Byron Wien), and therefore were never wrong!
We become inured to modern developments: Last year The Economist wrote "In 1981 over 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. ... Forty years later, only 8% of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty; more than half, on some measures, count as middle class." Stocks now garner historically unthinkable market caps, but ASML just reported €9 billion in orders for its semiconductor production equipment in a single quarter, which dwarfs the annual revenues of the entire industry when I started in the business. Facebook has three billion (!) active monthly users ... ony Coca-Cola used to have numbers like that. I stumbled across a silly YouTube channel where a kid flies around visiting one-star-reviewed restaurants; he has 14 million (!) subscribers https://youtube.com/@ryan , from which he must generate a seven-figure income.
Sure, there are issues with a change from industrial to service economies, with income and wealth inequality, with the rise of nationalism and authoritarian regiemes, but every modern generation faces relentless change and must adapt and overcome ... hopefully without needing depressions or world/cold wars to do so. If we just tweaked the tax system to make it more progressive, changed healthcare systems to single-payer models, elected in some adult supervision in politics, and agreed on sensible energy mix and carbon pricing, we'd probably feel as bullish on the world as we probably felt right before what I feel was the year everything started to change from old to new 'round about 1996. Perhaps that's the eventuality the bouyant stock market is discounting.
P.S. Prompted by this exchange, I just turned my "1996: The Year The World Changed" slide deck into a Substack post https://gunnarmiller.substack.com/p/1996-the-year-the-world-changed .
A useful analysis; but - 2 thoughts.
JK argues that ‘progress’ came with the decline in ‘religion’ and advance of science - post 1850. Yes, but - before the corruption of the church in the 18th & 19th C, the foremost scientists & philosophers existed within the church. Thus change came in Northern Europe but not Asia, as JK says.
Pessimism, and now cynicism, have not led to ‘progress’ but negativity even despair, particularly post 1960.
Synthesising these, it may be that we need to value science, technology and entrepreneurship, but hold philosophical views of hope and respect for a greater whole. Meanwhile laissez faire liberalism, populism & militant Islam are antithetical to progress.
That Economist article from which I pulled that quote above has some more great nuggets on how societies are changing ... and how sometimes they're (surprisingly) not https://www.economist.com/interactive/international/2023/08/03/western-values-are-steadily-diverging-from-the-rest-of-the-world .
"English-speaking countries [referring to the US, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia] used to be clearly distinct from Protestant Europeans (with stronger religious affiliations) but the two groups have become harder to distinguish."
"In 1998, 38% of Protestant Europeans and 32% of Muslims said most people could be trusted. By 2022 trust in Europe had risen (with more than half of Europeans saying that they trusted people) but it had plummeted in Islamic countries, where just 15% of respondents said people are trustworthy. In 1998 Catholic Europeans and Latin Americans also had comparable levels of trust. By 2022, the proportion of Catholic Europeans who said they trusted people was three times higher than that of Latin Americans."
"In 1981, for example, 47% of Americans described themselves as non-religious (saying God was not important in their lives, that they did not attend church services and so on). The share in Sweden was 58%. By 2022 the share in America had risen by 14 points, almost matching Sweden’s. Meanwhile Orthodox, Islamic and Latin American countries have seen either smaller changes or, in some cases, movement towards more traditionalism and collectivism. That does not necessarily invalidate the idea that global values will one day converge. But it does suggest that day may be some way off."
"At a broad level, values and politics are obviously and intimately connected. Traditional values seem to be more associated with autocracies; one-person-one-vote systems embody individualistic values. It can be no coincidence that during the past decade authoritarian populists have done especially well in two of the regions where the slowdown or reversal of secular-rational values has occurred: Orthodox countries (such as Russia and Belarus) and Latin America (Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela). In Orthodox, Latin American and Islamic countries support for democracy also plummeted, as measured by the share of the population saying they thought it was good or fairly good to have a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections. In all three regions the share saying they thought this rose by between one-third and two-thirds between 1998 and 2022. That hardly bodes well for the future of democracy. Even so, there is no simple relationship between values and politics, as the example of American religious voters suggests. The persistence of the devout and traditionalist right in Europe and America is clearly connected with discontent at spreading individualism. But it is not so clear whether voters have changed and organised themselves into more powerful far-right parties, or whether the parties have simply managed more successfully than in the past to sell their politics to voters who have not changed that much themselves."
My distillation: Religion is important in shaping society ... especially in places where religion is no longer important!
I am 100% with you. And completely agree with your thoughts on the church ads holder of wisdom and science before it got corrupted. In my previous post on patience and long-term thinking I reference Deirdre McCloskey's books on Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Values. I think it is an underappreciated fact that holding science and technology in high esteem leads to progress, while holding populism and if I may add the adoration of sports stars, singers, etc. is holding us back. As Friedman (the NYT columnist, not the economist) once said: The difference between China and the US is that in the US everyone wants to be like Britney Spears, in China everyone wants to be like Bill Gates.
Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist - Morgan Housel
'why the Industrial Revolution took hold in England and Northern Europe'
The (Scottish) enlightenment revolutionized how we look at family structures: the individual became the minimal unit of society. Clearing the way for the division of labour. Add to that a lot of English coal and...
'Yet, modern conservatism has sometimes morphed into something where ‘progress’ and ‘optimism’ have become dirty words.”'
I wouldn't tie conservation-sentiments solely to conservatives, at all. While it is progressives who are falling for degrowth. Since they are, much more than conservatives, economical illiterates.
One, just one, example:
The traditionally progressive Amsterdam population was asked in a 1994 referendum 'where can the city build houses?' (The city needed and still needs tens of thousands of houses and appartments).
1 Can we build higher? Voters: no!
2 Can we build in the meadows surrounding us? (We call that nature in the Netherlands). Voters: no!
3 Can we reclaim land from a lake (the consequences would be that a few thousand birds would have to move some 2 km and float somewhere else. They would have to figure that out all by themselves...). Voters: no!
Of course some years later they were overruled, land was reclaimed and the birds now float a mile or so further away. And no one cares about nor remembers the referendum...
I find progressives hilariously conservative:
The environmental laws they've introduced the past 2, 3 generations - one funky frog can block a new neighborhood, road or industrial site (industry = bah);
Their nitrogen fundamentalism if not nihilism (the values our gov accepts are 300 x more stringent than Germany's...) prohibits the building of infrastructure and again neighborhoods;
ESG has seen p funds and asset managers leaving energy exploration and mining, making the energy 'transition' even more expensive. (The Dutch excel at this kind of cheap-as-of-now virtue signalling);
They built a windmill forest WITHOUT a matching electricity grid meaning we face a decade of electricity delivery problems and, once again, neighborhoods can't be build while industry can't expand since there is no juice (of course that's still not as bad as the UK where windmill parks face a decade + before they can connect to the grid, FGS);
And finally through democratization the opportunities for citizens 'to have their say' can delay anything for many years.
What did go fast?
Solar panel subsidies for middle class citizens;
Guaranteed prices for those citizens selling back 'their' electricity;
Subsidizing BWM and Jaguar drivers to change to Tesla;
Replacing gas fueled utility plants by subsidized local biomass plants. *
They may be economical illiterates but these progressives sure know where the money is. Perhaps because they're overrepresented in gov roles?
* You could say fossil is subsidized as well and that is true, but the motivation there is energy security. A notion completely lost on progressives it seems. But they're going to find out soon. At home and in the ballot box.
Two interesting thoughts, Joel. I detest the term ‘progressive’ because the word presupposes that there is a single clear path towards …… what? ‘Progressives’ do not say but there is a self certainty that they are morally superior. As you indicate, in ways they are regressive; and this is not a Left -v- Right issue. I am a ‘social conservative’ but never a ‘Conservative’.
Planning for Climate Change: It makes me furious, and concerned for my great grandchildren, that our ‘elite and betters’ play pretend ‘Green washing’ in the face of an existential risk. In your example (windmills far from grid) HMG should enable private capital to rebuild the national grid. Same in California where failing 70 yo pylons start wild fires.
The grid should have been taken care of at the same time wind and solar was being promoted and subsidized - 20 years ago. (While nuclear was, and often still is, iffy for many).
But windmills are photo opps, grid expansion isn't.
Oh what truth you speak. To give you some numbers, we need to invest about $17 trillion in power generation from renewables, nuclear and gas with CCS until 2050 (according to BNEF). But what often gets forgotten is that we also have to invest about $9.2 trillion in new grid infrastructure and $4 trillion in existing grid infrastructure (all figures are worldwide and in today's dollars). In essence, for every dollar invested in sexy power generation projects that provide photo ops to politicians and business leaders we need to invest some 80 cents in the boring stuff that gets the power to factories and households. It's just that grids don't make for good photo ops and so we don't invest nearly enough in that stuff.
I fear the end result will be what we see with our water infrastructure in the UK right now. Businesses will underinvest for years and decades and when it starts to fail,m they will ask the government for a bailout.
From an article in italian by NICOLÒ ADDARIO Full professor of general sociology. Teaches Theory of Social Change and Innovation and Political Communication at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
THE ORIGINS OF THE “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION” THAT ROCKED THE WORLD
https://medium.com/@gberardi78/the-origins-of-the-creative-destruction-that-rocked-the-world-62671e7a6897