Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there's an education level that plays into the mix and so if it's inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.

It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.

I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don't know what the future is going to hold.

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.