There are two basic "worldviews" that come into play when we think about our choices for future investments : I call them the streamlining or diversifying worldviews.
Perhaps they are best seen initially in their most extreme forms, in the behaviour of many stock market investors.
The most extreme form of streamlined investing is when you 'bet the farm' all on one stock or bond, based on your confidence that you alone know the future better than the entire world market does.
You reserve the right to change your mind, minute by minute, always propelled by your belief that each new investment plump is based on you being one of the smartest guys in the universe.
The most extreme form of diversified investing is when you invest, once, in a broad index-based fund that stops trying to second guess the future on a hour by hour basis and that simply hunkers down for a steady long term gain based on the entire market being generally right.
Nazi Eugenics was WWII's most extreme form of the streamlining worldview : picking the A-1 Aryan stock and binning the 4-F failures.
Dr Newt Richards, boss of the medical division of America's top war science agency the OSRD, was intellectually not too far behind the Nazis in worshipping at the fountain of streamlining.
Very early on, well ahead of any actual experience at hand, and under a cloak of extreme secrecy, he streamlined-with-extreme-prejudice the handful of firms and techniques that he saw as the winners in the race to mass produce wartime penicillin - and brutally binned the rest of humanity and Nature.
He basically 'bet the farm' on man-made synthetic penicillin produced by the Merck-Squibb corporations.
By contrast, his chief intellectual opponent, Dr Henry Dawson, was always very public in his approach, letting the whole world know that even a mere handful of individuals, such as his own team, with no grants or big institutions supporting them, could still make a significant scientific and humanitarian difference in the effort to mass produce wartime penicillin.
His DIY approach soon spread across the world, with tiny teams working at multiple approaches to the problem, "many hands make light work", focussed on many varied ways to see Nature's fungus produce more natural penicillin with less human effort, material and energy.
In the end, Dawson's diverse approach won - continuing to be the way we make almost all of our antibiotics to this very day.
Richards'streamlined bet on Merck ( his own firm) and on synthetic penicillin failed totally - in WWII- and ever since.
There is a much larger metaphor in all this, for our world as it faces an uncertain energy and climate-changing future : streamline our investments down to just hydrocarbon fossils or diversify into wind and sun ?
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