Gold, Lindy effect, Warren Buffett, and why ignorance is not bliss

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Ignorance is bliss and little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The English language has a pithy saying for almost every occasion.

But if ignorance is bliss then how can little knowledge be a dangerous thing? The twain don’t meet. Dear reader, let me leave you with that thought and tell you a small story. Or rather a memory.

Or possibly a life lesson. In the late 2000s and the early 2010s, I was what you would call a bit of a gold bug. This happened because I had read some Austrian school economics that firmly believes in the idea of sound money backed by gold.

And those were days when central banks of the Western world backed by their democratically elected governments were printing money left, right and centre and creating it out of thin air, which went against the very idea of sound money that Austrian school economics believes in. Back then, I was still naïve enough to believe that what I wrote made a difference in changing the minds of my readers. Now, with nearly a decade and a half more on my side, I humour my ego in other different ways.

So, this naivety basically led me to interview all kinds of gold bugs; interviews my editors were happy to publish in the Monday edition of the newspaper I used to work for at the time. As any veteran editor of a business publication will tell you, it’s most difficult to fill up the Monday edition of a newspaper. And these gold bugs gave me all kinds of forecasts for where the price of gold was headed.

It started with a forecast of gold crossing $2,000 per ounce (one troy ounce equals 31.1 grams). Then someone said it would cross $3,000. This was followed by forecasts of $5,000, $10,000 and finally $55,000 per ounce.