Footnotes
1.
World
Bank statistics, nominal GDPs, 1960 and 2022.
1a
This essay gets to a very crucial idea, central to all analysis.
According to a Washington Post writer, “…we evolved to survive in the
world, not necessarily to understand it.” What we therefore study in school is
a set of disciplines, slices of reality. Once we get out of school, we
encounter complexity (and all sorts of human motivations) and markets!
We
thought that we could, once and for all, say the last word on markets. It turns
out, changing markets will always have an infinite amount to say. But, and this
is crucial, to handle complex markets it is necessary to have a consistent
viewpoint. In our case, it is “value.”
And it is also true that, to make markets, value investors could not
exist without momentum investors, and vice-versa. Free markets should make
people very tolerant, as was the intent of the Enlightenment and the drafters
of the U.S. Constitution.
2.
Peter
Heather, John Rapley; “Why Empires Fall”; Yale
University Press, London; 2023; p.p. 33-34.
Mr. Heather is an historian at King’s College, London.
Mr. Rapley is a political economist at the University
of Cambridge. The viewpoints of a historian and an economist result in a very
realistic book.
A 12/23 N.Y. Metropolitan Museum exhibit, Africa and Byzantium, adds another dimension
to Roman history. In 416 A.D., St. Augustine asked his congregation in Carthage
(now modern Tunisia), “Who now knows which peoples of the Roman empire are
what, since all have become Romans…”
“For almost 700 years, some of the Roman and Byzantine empires’
wealthiest, most important provinces were in Egypt and northern Africa…”
3.
Dan
Jones; “Powers and Thrones”; Viking; United States; 2021; p.p. 38-39.
4.
Heather
& Rapley, p. 103.
5.
Ibid.,
p. 104.
6.
Ibid.,
p. 109.
7.
Ibid.,
p. 164.
8.
Ibid.,
p. 137.
9.
Danielle
Allen; “Justice by Means of Democracy”; The University
of Chicago Press; Chicago; 2023; p. 20.
10.
Ibid.,
p. 21.
11.
Ibid.,
p. 21.
12.
Ibid.,
p. 30.
13.
Ibid.,
p. 201.
14.
Ibid.,
p. 208.
15.
Ibid.,
p. 203.
16.
Ibid.,
p. 206.