The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [4]
Adam Taggart, for his attention as an early editor and for taking charge as ship’s captain, keeping our site and business sailing smoothly when I was absorbed in this project.
Finally, I’d like to thank the www.ChrisMartenson.com community for their passion, enthusiasm, and interest in these ideas, for the intelligent conversation they provide on a daily basis, and for their faithful support of this work. Together we are achieving a tipping point of awareness, which is possible thanks to the early adopters of this mission. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who helped us get here.
Introduction
Not long ago, I was firmly seated on the American Dream bandwagon. I had done everything that you are supposed to do—and more. In the 1990s, I earned my PhD in Pathology/Toxicology from Duke University and did two years of post-doctoral research with the intention of becoming a full-time professor. But life takes its twists and turns; I went on to get an MBA from Cornell and spent the next 10 years working my way through and up the corporate ladder, ultimately becoming a VP at SAIC, a Fortune 300 company. These details are helpful in understanding three things about me: (1) I bring a scientist’s understanding and love of data to my work, (2) I am thoroughly at home with financial concepts, and (3) I gave up a very lucrative and promising career to work on the material that now appears in The Crash Course.
I first noticed something was awry in 2002, when my portfolio of hard-earned investments hit a new low. At that time, my wife Becca, my three children, and I lived in a 6-bedroom, 5-bathroom house in Mystic, Connecticut. Our boat was in a slip less than a mile away, we had numerous friends and acquaintances, and our children were tracked into the local elementary school. I recall several increasingly uncomfortable conversations with our broker at the time, not because of the losses per se, but because he kept giving me reassurances when I wanted information and context. How did this downturn compare to prior events? What was driving it? How long did people have to wait to recoup their losses in the past? What sort of time horizon should we be expecting before things recover? What will drive that recovery? None of these questions was ever answered to my satisfaction, so I set about researching the answers myself. What I found shocked me to my core.
I discovered that my nation, far from being the economic ocean liner of the world, was instead like a leaky rowboat. Our levels of debt were extraordinary by any historical measure. Our entitlement programs alone were quite obviously underfunded enough to sink the ship, or at least put a few holes in the hull at the waterline. Our primary sources of wealth creation, manufacturing jobs, were leaving for distant shores, and I could not fathom how merely shuffling paper, a massive growth industry at the time, created any real or lasting wealth. If our 2003 trade deficit were a nation, it would have had the twentieth largest GDP in the world, indicating that Americans’ overconsumption exceeded the entire economic activity of all but the largest countries. I was thoroughly stumped by how these things could possibly go on forever, or even for much longer, and so I began to dig deeper.
My wife calls this the period when I “fell down the rabbit hole” like Alice in Wonderland, but to me it seemed more like an entire interconnecting warren of rabbit holes. There was data everywhere, and some of it did not make any sense to me—or at least I could not understand why I had not heard these important things before. I began to share what I was finding with everyone who would listen, especially my wife.
By 2003, our views of the future had become closely aligned, and we decided to move from Mystic to . . . somewhere, anywhere . . . with more community, ample resources, and a few defining characteristics that we thought would provide a better match to the future we saw coming. By July