Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of October 22, 2024

Article Excerpt

Here’s Part Two of the letter I sent to our Portfolio Management clients in August 2024: Modern bureaucrats at work Max Planck (1858-1947) was a German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, for which he won the 1918 Nobel Prize. He also gets informal credit for a memorable scientific one-liner, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.” This reflects the observation that scientific advances often emerge as old scientists die off with their old beliefs intact, while newcomers are more open to new ideas. That’s the problem with bureaucracies, especially in government offices. They generally have nothing to gain by speeding things up. Of course, long-time employees in government or company offices do tend to adhere to a fixed rule: “We’ve always done it this way.” This rule would have made perfect sense in the ancient bureaucracies, where progress in any given year or decade or century was random and mostly negligible. Prior to 1984, the Chevron Deference may have made some sense because…