Some Advice To My Daughter With Respect To Her Now Unborn Children

 

       The article in the FT of London yesterday about the changes in the labor force got me thinking and reflecting. The first challenge we have is the millions of lower skilled people who have lost their jobs. Many of these jobs will not come back. (This is not just a US problem.) We might have a segment of the population permanently unemployed. What do we do about this? I will leave you to reflect on this.

        Now the next challenge is our grandchildren who will one day enter the labor market and be forced to compete for jobs and economically survive. They will face competition from very smart artificial intelligence machines. They will face competition from very smart and highly-skilled people living in less-developed countries willing to work for lower wages. They will face the challenge of climate change and previously politically stable countries that become politically unstable (The US and Chile are examples.)

      Anna, what would I advise you and Gabriel to do when your now-unborn children come into the world? Get the hell out of Brasil!!!!!!! For me, Brasil is a beloved country. But it is collapsing into an ungovernable environmental mess. High crime and social unrest will be the way of life. Climate change will create a disaster with my beloved Rio eventually being flooded out of existence.

    Where would I tell you to go? Looking forward, I would advise you to look seriously at Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Greenland. These places have cold climates now. They will become more temperate as temperatures rise. Norway would be the best of the best. It is prosperous, politically stable, economically viable, and very welcoming. They now have quite a number of immigrants from African countries and the Middle East, for example. Everyone is required to learn English.

     How do you prepare these yet unborn children for the harsh new world that we are facing? I would say be honest with them and realistic. Do not frighten them. Instead tell them that original thinking and innovativeness are the keys to survival. Give them the best education that you can. The rugged individualism of past generations is not going to work any more. It is not going to be "every man and woman for himself or herself."

     As most of you know, I spent 8 months of my life in an African village in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. These wonderful people were members of Nelson Mandela's Xhosa tribe. Their whole mindset was to think of the welfare of the group first and the individual second. Your family will be your tribe. One of your children could be a super star. The rest of the kids may not achieve that status. You and Gabriel will need to provide inherited wealth. You children will need to share their wealth between them. I'm not advocating socialism on a grand scale. I am advocating it at the family level.

     I have a passion for Charles Darwin. He was that man with one eye in a world full of blind people. People believe that his banner saying was "The survival of the fittest." He was misunderstood. What he was really saying is: "The survival of the most adaptable." I will add the word innovative to that expression.