#113- The Lost Art of Building

Investing is one of the lowest effort, highest reward, white collar career jobs because return on capital is extremely high (if not infinite) for the principal. And that is why we see "financialization" as one of the key themes of the late 20th and present day 21st century.

But in doing so, we forget that any financialization, or “innovative” financialization (like the securitization we saw emerge in the 70s, ballooning in 90s and eventually showing us the mirror in early 00s) still involves underwriting the underlying high effort, low reward, blue collar career jobs like manufacturing, agriculture, or construction.

Nobody today, including myself, has any incentive or inkling to do the latter than the former. We are underwriting from spreadsheets when we should be underwriting from sweat.

It isn’t wrong. But in doing so, we’ve lost the muscle memory of building. Manufacturing, agriculture, construction, trading, logistics, technology, and even physical retail are the systems that made the US a superpower post-WW2, that made Japan an innovation engine, that turned China into the world’s factory. These are the gears of real progress. They compound not just GDP, but capability.

Financialization has abstracted us so far from the ground reality that we’ve forgotten the real power, national power, economic power, and even technological power, still lies in the hard, unflattering, non-seductive work of building and shipping things. Chips, energy infrastructure, precision manufacturing, defense; these are the levers of the future, and we’ve left them understaffed, & undervalued.

If we really want to be future-ready, we need to rediscover the lost art of building. Not just spreadsheets and valuations, but factories, machines, and people in uniform. The backbone of a truly advanced nation lies first in its capability, not capital.