Investing In The Future

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

I am more or less retired.  My investments are therefore meant to take care of me, not grow for my future.  But it took a lot of years to get here and during those years I was truly investing in the future – like most everyone else in the world.  There are smart ways and not so smart ways to do so.  Early on, I did everything on my own and while I had net growth, there were a lot of big wins and big losses, even some total losses.  But what I was lucky.  Eventually I accumulated enough to get professional help and that was when I learned the power of divestment and steady growth.  I wonder what life would be like if we approached other things that way?

Here’s the the stat that got me thinking about this.  According to Google AI we’ve spent about 12 billion on the war in Iran to date.  According to that same source, we spent 1.9 trillion (with a “T”) to fight climate change in 2019.  What’s paying off better?

So back to my analogy on personal investing.  It is fun to speculate, and even today I have a small portion of my portfolio set aside as “play money” that I invest in something that if it pays off will pay off huge, but the odds are most likely that I will be flushing the money down the drain – or at least end up selling at a significant loss.  The key is to limit those play investments to losses I can afford – like gambling, never bet more than you can afford to lose.

Now back to the war and climate change.  The war will, unquestionably, make the world a better place.  It already has actually.  The extent of those benefits is to be determined, so that 12 billion could give a small return or a big return depending on how things turn out, but it will yield positively.  How about climate change?  What’s its yield?  Right now it is all costs and no returns.  But moreover it is so speculative that we have no way of measuring the returns should they actually occur.  There is no baseline for comparison.

So, given the preceding paragraph and standard investing wisdom, which should we be putting more money into – the war or climate change?  Which are we putting more money into?  Doesn’t quite add up, does it?

The next time someone brings up the cost of this war, you might want to remind them that we are just investing in the future.  And doing so a lot more smartly than the last administration.  It’s all in the numbers.