On Progress and Prosperity: Essays 2019–2024. 2024. Laurence B. Siegel. Edited by Wayne Wagner. Montesquieu Press.
Suppose you rolled into one particular person an intense curiosity about his area, a first-rate intelligence, many years {of professional} expertise, a present for lucid writing, and an irrepressible humorousness. You’ll get one thing like Laurence B. Siegel, whose propulsively readable essays make up this quantity. They had been chosen by Wayne Wagner, founding accomplice of Wilshire Associates and a person with the breadth of expertise to match Siegel’s.
With two exceptions, the articles are Siegel’s guide evaluations from 2019 by way of 2024. The exceptions are a reprint of a Monetary Analysts Journal article (co-authored by Siegel) and an interview about his guide Fewer, Richer, Greener. The subjects span virtually all the things a severe funding skilled must know — not simply to research securities however to understand the financial, technological, and political currents that form them.
Twenty-four articles are grouped into 5 sections: Progress, Investing, Expertise, Political Financial system, and “Provocative.” The questions they handle are as formidable as their titles recommend: What cultural components stimulate innovation and development? What mental instruments sharpen funding perception? What should we perceive about expertise to navigate the forces reshaping markets? What ideas of political financial system make clear the swirl of coverage and beliefs? And the way, lastly, can we merely suppose higher? On Progress and Prosperity has stimulating solutions to all.
Siegel has the reward of condensing a guide’s insights into memorable phrases and vivid photos. The quantity is scattered with aphorisms, some his, others borrowed. From Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works: “Unbelievable preparations of the world, crystallized penalties of vitality technology, are what each life and expertise are all about.” Or “It’s the individuals who drive down prices and simplify the product who make the largest distinction.”
Siegel delights in such clarifying strains. He notes that the pc in your iPhone “has extra computing energy than a $30 million Cray-2 supercomputer from the Eighties — and 100,000 occasions that of the Apollo 11 craft.” Reviewing Andrew McAfee’s Extra from Much less, he distills the argument: “Making extra out of much less is what a lot of the human enterprise is about.” On environmental priorities: “Everyone needs a clear atmosphere, however poorer folks need different issues extra –consuming, for instance.” As for recommendation to buyers: “Don’t be lazy. Be very lazy.” (Darwin may need authorized.)
Siegel’s overview of Sebastian Mallaby’s historical past of enterprise capital captures the essence of that enterprise with a single mordant line: “All of them contain unreasonable, maladjusted people who find themselves a ache within the neck.” That, too, has funding relevance.
In his tackle Brad DeLong’s Slouching In direction of Utopia, Siegel writes: “Everybody was born right into a world by which the essential components of a good life have already been invented. We must always ponder our wonderful luck lest we squander it.” Elsewhere, quoting Roger Ibbotson, he reminds us: “Finance seems terribly difficult, however when simplified to its naked necessities it depends on two costs: the value of danger and the value of time.” Kevin Coldiron provides the sequel: “With out constructive actual curiosity, due to this fact, there will be no capital. With out capital, no capitalism.”
Even the charts and tables are value lingering over. A graph on web page 38 exhibits international GDP taking off like a rocket round 1800. Others reveal when air pollution started falling, how fertility patterns reversed, and the way industries developed over two centuries of US capitalism. It’s like getting a visible refresher in financial historical past — with out tuition.
Siegel by no means loses sight of his viewers. He spells out why every guide or thought issues to funding professionals: “Buyers have to be keenly conscious of the sources of, and obstacles to, innovation of their seek for potential returns.” Reviewing McAfee once more, he notes: “Some firms and industries can be harm whereas others can be helped immensely. Actively managed portfolios can profit from this perception.”
From his Monetary Analysts Journal reprint: “Most choice makers — pension trustees, consultants, and portfolio managers — aren’t conscious of the tendency of mean-variance optimization to amplify the errors of the enter assumptions.” A mild reminder, and a helpful one.
Siegel is not any cheerleader. He praises generously however doesn’t spare criticism. McAfee’s Extra from Much less, he notes, is about one slender facet of technological progress, dematerialization, and readers in search of a broader perspective ought to try McAfee’s earlier co-written guide, The Second Machine Age. Of DeLong’s guide: “He imagines his restructuring proposal is liberal, however it’s deeply reactionary, throwing sand within the gears of mobility and ambition.” On the boundaries of the market to supply happiness: “That’s as a result of it’s not purported to! The market is an financial system, not (tempo Ayn Rand) an ethical one.”
To say that Siegel’s evaluations are a concise substitute for the books themselves can be unfair — to the books. Nonetheless, readers on the lookout for sharp, well-informed insights into a number of the most essential concepts shaping economics and investing will discover On Progress and Prosperity an training in itself, and an entertaining one. Some good readers will undoubtedly seek advice from lots of the chapters once more over the course of their careers.
