Time to give better advice about time

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Professionals who give advice (as opposed to treating current problems) need to be able to talk about time and help their clients envision the future they will be living in.  This is true for financial planners, physicians, nutritionists, clergy, and even landscape architects.  In order to help someone create their best possible future, there’s a need to project how what can be done today might turn out in a decade or two.

The Worldview Two challenge arises when the next twenty years are likely to be very different from how the last decades have turned out.  It was a good idea to build a beach house before, but probably not so much today.  The plants that flourished in a garden in the Twentieth Century might not do so well with new weather patterns.

Financially, I believe we have entered a period when economic growth as a reliable trend is “over.”  This follows both from the limits in real resources, especially energy, and from the limits imposed by climate change.  Expecting invest returns to “revert to the mean” will probably lead to disappointment or worse.

I had the opportunity to speak on The End of Growth at the recent national Retreat of the Financial Planning Association in Palm Springs (a place with a questionable future in a future without enough energy or water, though it has lots of sun).  If you click on the Publications tab on this website, you can see my slides from that talk and read some other articles I’ve written for the financial planning community.

It’s important for individuals to prepare for a future without material growth, and for advisors to help create meaningful futures in that environment.

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