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Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

I look at these headlines a few ways:

1. People have been saying next year is going to be total doom and gloom just about every year since around 2011 or so.

2. They’ve all basically been wrong up until now and if you got scared and sold out when the headlines started you would have lost a ton of $$$

3. Eventually the market will go down and someone will claim to be right, probably through sheer dumb luck

4. When the next cycle starts the media will be all over the person from #3 saying they are now again predicting something will happen, but they’ll likely be wrong this time

When you’ve lived though a few of the above cycles you learn to do your best to stay calm and take a balanced approach to life and money. Things go up and down in the short term but in the long term things have reliably gone up.

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> in the long term things have reliably gone up

Growth can't last forever in a finite world, so things will start to decline eventually. The question is when...

It's a bit simplistic to argue that because things have gone up until now, they'll keep going up.

The world now is in a very different shape than it was 50 years ago. There are many global indicators that give us better insight than simply stating "tomorrow will be the same as today". Things like global warming, resource depletion...

And yet if you actually try to invest for your life on this basis you will reach the end of your working life with very few assets to fall back on.

Who says the world is effectively finite? We've consistently invented more to want and buy, which has promoted even activity, and so on, for the last millennium at least.

s/even/even more/

> Things go up and down in the short term but in the long term things have reliably gone up.

And yet, recent articles have warned that millennials may need to save more than prior generations, because people are predicting weaker economic growth over the next ~50 years or so than the previous.

Anyone trying to make economic predictions about timescales that large is blowing hot air.

and ironically ETFs or something seem the only "sane" way to do so

I read a 2002 book that basically said “You’ll need to adjust your expectations of future equities growth. It’ll be more like 3% annually, not 7%”.

I was concerned.

Since that book was published, equities have gone up on average 6.6%, which includes the 2008 crash.

And of course in 2002 very few people were predicting that China would achieve the scale that it has at the pace that it has. A lot of people were predicting the rise of China in the 1990s. Almost nobody was calling for their GDP to 10x so rapidly, going from $1.4t in 2002 to $14t 17 years later.

That resulted in an additional $45-$50 trillion in new wealth in just China alone. The knock-on value creation is probably equal to that globally. Most predictions didn't see that coming at that scale and how it could further lift global S&P 500 type companies (and the US stock market along with it).

This is true!

I think my main point was past predictions about long term economic growth have been wrong in the past, so I would weigh new ones very carefully.

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