Lucky America
Buenos Aires part 2, plus a podcast
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Today, I want to share two things.
First, a podcast, here, with Barton Hooper, a person who has been analyzing stocks for a long time and provides thoughtful perspective about the “magnificent 7,” the high flying tech stocks. As he reminded me, the more a stock goes up, the more things need to “go right” for the stock to keep going. A recent example is Apple. While the stock has extraordinary cash flow, earlier this year it was priced so high that a combination of China’s slowdown (where a lot of iPhones were once sold), lawsuits and the lack of an AI halo has been enough for the stock to sink when the indexes rise.
Second, I want to talk about geography and luck.
I’ve been in Argentina for the last 10 days observing the wonderful and the awful. The wonderful are chill cafes full of jabbering people, bright sun and warm conversations with everyone I’ve met. My corner deli has a sign that declares todos los animales son bienvenidos aqui, which captures a certain softness here. The awful is desperate people picking through trash, paying for meals with stacks of money now that what was once $10 bills are worth $1 and clouds of dengue poisoned mosquitos. The mosquitos in particular got me thinking about geography.
Dengue
I write this wondering if I will get dengue. The very name sounds awful, I think I first heard about it in reference to US troops in Vietnam. It seems far away, Walter Cronkite on TV, grainy images.
What was it like? I asked a shop assistant here, who told me he had just recovered from dengue.
Terrible. You don’t want to get it, he said, rolling his eyes as if terrible pain was waiting just off stage. Another person I was supposed to meet with down here suffered the severe form of dengue that attacks your blood cells and crushes your platelet count. Scary. He is still recovering.
One day we were here, there was fierce, tropical style rain, a perfect breeding ground for mosquitos.
Source: CDC
I knew about dengue before I arrived and wore thick clothes and bug spray despite the heat. Then I had a meeting by a polo club. Freshly cut grass. Maybe they water the field. While waiting to get picked up, a mosquito found a gap between my pants and my shoes and dug in.
Now I wait. According to Dr. Google, it’s 4-10 days. That was three days ago. Dr. Google also says about 2% of the mosquitos carry dengue. Fingers crossed. I am either sitting on a time bomb or overly anxious. One thing you notice about the map above—none of the places with dengue are wealthy--except Singapore—and there is a flow of people out of the places with dengue towards places without dengue, which makes perfect sense.
Lucky Geography
Emily DickInson said, there is no frigate like a book. That’s true. There is also no frigate like a frigate, in today’s world shrieking, silver airplanes rocketing across the skies. When I think about the things I didn’t learn in school, many of them come from traveling. Coming here, I knew that, yes, hundreds of millions of people catch dengue each year and some of them die, but it was an idea—like the bombs in Ukraine—that seemed distant to me until I encountered each of them first-hand and stared at those welts on my ankle.
Travel adds emotional context to something you know intellectually, like my happiness at waking up today without a fever and imagining what it is like for a young mom with a baby in the poorest barrio of Buenos Aires, Treinta Y Uno, without air conditioning and swarmed by insects. It’s just dumb luck that I grew up without dengue.
Seen up close, I notice America’s deficiencies: collapsing bridges, a government system that throughout my life has seemed like it barely functioned, a history of primitive racism, Trump. But the US, seen from the vantage point of Moscow, Beijing, Riga or, today, from Buenos Aires, seems like a mythically rich land of lucre.
Geography gives the US:
Good neighbors, good in the sense that they don’t try to attack, like Russia to Ukraine or Iraq to Kuwait or Israel’s neighbors.
Raw materials, meaning a major producer of both agriculture, oil and natural gas, unlike, say, China, which has a huge population but much less farm land.
A climate far enough north to be relatively unscathed by climate change.