Your Bucket List by Gary North

Your Bucket List by Gary North

On October 3, 2009, I attended my 50^th high school reunion. The 50^th high school reunion is the last hurrah institutionally in the United States. No other final meeting will attract as many people from a person’s generation. There is nothing like your 50^th high school reunion to remind you that the clock is ticking.
The committee posted the photos of the known deceased. Some had been gone for 25 years. Others had been gone less than a year. But the reality was clear: the list would grow.
The men were all unrecognizable. So were most of the women. There were a few exceptions, however. Time had not run over all of us to the same degree. A couple of men looked more distinguished than at 18. I hated to see them.
The reunion committee supplied name tags with the senior year photos. These were reminders of time gone by. We could see the before-after contrast. The contrast was considerable, with only one exception – not mine. Grim.
It reminded me of my 25^th reunion. I had on my tag. I was in an elevator. A young woman asked me what the meeting was. I told her. She asked what a 25^th reunion was like. It came to me in a flash. "It’s an exercise in comparative rot." She is now pushing 50.
At the hotel where I stayed the first night, another 50^th reunion was scheduled. A friend of mine from the American Legion’s Boys State program had been student body president at that school. I would have liked to walk over to see him, but he had died of heart disease several years earlier. He had been a great football player. That was a reminder, too. The clock is ticking.
At the Sunday brunch, I sat with three people. One I had known well; the other I had known fairly well; the third hardly at all.
One of them remarked that she had drawn up her bucket list. That term comes from a movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Two men meet in a hospital. Both are terminally ill. They draw up a list of things to do before they die. They agree to do the things on the list together. It is better to share the events on the list.
My list has always been books written and educational materials produced. It is a long list. It will take good health and a functioning mind for me to do all of it. It will take at least a decade, I forecasted.
My role model is F. A. Hayek, the Nobel-Prize economist. I interviewed him in 1985 in Austria. He was 86. He had just finished the manuscript for his magnum opus: the capstone book of his career. It is a fine book: The Fatal Conceit.
Another example for me is Jacques Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence. It appeared in 2000. It footnoted articles that he had written in the late 1930s.
The grand old man of economics today is Ronald Coase. I once wrote an entire book against his famous theorem. He is still alive at 101. He is still writing.
One of the other people at the table at brunch was my old competitor in public speaking. She was a real challenge then. She got better over the years. She spent a career in education. Her husband of 40 years had developed a successful business. Then he died in 2003. Six months later, the business went under through no fault of hers. It was shut down by the authorities. Unbeknownst to her husband, there had been a crook inside the firm who had cheated the city and, indirectly, the U.S. government. She lost her retirement nest egg and spent three years paying lawyers. She now works in a small book store.
That, too, reminded me: procrastination kills. The unexpected can strike at any time.
At every 50^th reunion, there are stories like these. The people at every table should pay attention to these stories.
The list of your deceased classmates is growing, year by year. You will be on it eventually. Get the high-priority items scratched off the list while you still can.
THE MISER
We are all told from an early age that the life of a miser is a wasted life. The miser spends every waking hour accumulating money. Yet he never seems to accomplish anything with his money. He simply accumulates it.
This is an inaccurate analysis, in so far as it applies to a free-market economy. In a free-market economy, a person can accumulate wealth only by serving customers. Nobody is going to give him all of that money just because he asks for it. Therefore, for as long as he is committed to the expansion of his net worth, he must serve customers faithfully. He must provide customers with products or services that they want to buy at the price that he is willing to accept.
To do this, he must maintain a competitive advantage against other sellers of similar goods and services. This forces him to innovate constantly. The customers are free to choose. They are also free to choose new tastes and desires. Therefore, the customer is exceedingly fickle. He keeps asking the seller: "What have you done for me lately?"
The miser, even though he is driven only by the desire to accumulate money, is a productive citizen in a free-market economy. He becomes a servant to customers, and customers find that they have a better lifestyle because of the commitment of the miser to accumulate ever greater wealth. The miser is obsessed with the accumulation of wealth, but in order to assuage his obsession, he must become obsessed with serving the demands of customers.
Think of what he has to do. He has to estimate what customers will be willing to pay for in the future. He must estimate competition from other sellers who will be actively seeking the money possessed by future customers. He must estimate the effects of government legislation on the markets in general, and his market in particular.