That was the name of a book of poetry by Jim Morrison (The Doors).


Yes, people in industrialized societies have lower fertility rates. But, as you have described, it is a lower rate of increase from a higher baseline, made possible by abundant, affordable products. (Meaning, the child/slave labor wouldn't even reach age 2 if they didn't have a factory to work in...)


But consider the vast demographic changes in the United States at the Turn of The Century, and consider that this population could just as well have come from birth as migration. While the total number and percentage of people living in cities rose, I doubt the population in rural areas declined, it probably rose too.


As you know, population growth does not "tax world resources." If the opposite were true, the mostly sparsely-populated continent, Africa, would be the richest, and Japan would be the poorest. I agree with you about Mexixo, except for to the extent they have a cultural problem. Of course, the statistical sample of Mexicans I have actually met, whether in California or in Mexico, would suggest just the opposite, that like the overseas Asians, Mexicans are ready-made with a culture that is compatible with our society.


So, anyway, I think that people are making the wrong comparison when they say populations are too high in these third-world dung heaps. You are compatinrg how they live and die like flies to how we live. The real comparison should be between living like a fly, and never having been born - which would have been the case before modern production made their subsistence possible.


These are "The New Creatures" - the bourgeois and free peasants made possible in a post-feudal economy, spreading from Tuscany north across Europe, and beyond. They are not born into any social station. Could this be what Jim Morrison was thinking? I doubt it, but who knows.


So far as currencies, I have every intention of being big in them in a few years. But today, I really don't have that much to go on apart from trend theory - and currencies are still pretty trendy. The interest-rate products have been so chopped up by trend traders, simply because they are the only place you can deploy so much size, but fortunately 1) I have proprietary trend-related model which also works in currencies, and 2) I have, just in the course of my random musings over teh last few years, developed an economic model to back up my chart-based deductions.


So, I can use trends, plus my trend-related tool in currencies, but my developing a good economic/exchange-rate model maye be a year or two off. And also, I can get almost all of the inouts into my US bond model right here in the US, right on Main Street.


Of course, I agreee with you that currencies are the epitome of a tradeable commodity, based on the nature of participants, and the incentives and constraints facing them. This in contrast to your little S&P P/E debate below, where whomever is most popular in the short-term stands to be "right" in an evolutionary sense, whatever the underlying demand may be.


No, IBM doesn't so much read Barrons before deciding how much of their Euro revenues to convert to dollars, or something. Stocks are mostly trendy in the intraday and multi-year timeframes, over which periods popular ideas give way to demand conditions.


eLROY