Dave's book review for How to Get Rich in American History

Oh boy. I should have seen if my local library had this book rather than purchasing it. I didn’t like the title, but the blurbs sounded great!

I used to be much more interested in finances and markets because, honestly, that’s what I thought adults were supposed to do. I used to subscribe to The Economist and I read each weekly issue and sagely nodded along. (I mostly loved the feel of the writing in that magazine.) When the kids came along, financial news is one of the first things I dropped as parenting taught me the value of my free time.

In the last couple years, I’m pretty sure I have observed the US markets detach entirely from reality. But it seems as though most people continue treating it as business as usual. I’m staring at this naked emperor strolling down the streets and I’m like, "Has no one noticed that this dude is naked?" and everybody’s just talking about the latest fashions like nothing totally nuts is happening right in front of their eyes. As the Zoolander meme goes, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

So a book promising to give a historical perspective, like:

plus

sounded right up my alley!

First things first, I did not find this book to be particularly funny. I know humor is highly subjective. But I was expecting a lot of amusing anecdotes and got…​maybe two or three? (It’s pretty easy to get a chuckle out of me and I laugh out loud at good lines in non-fiction books and articles all the time.) Oh well, I guess your mileage will vary on that one.

I haven’t read any other reviews for this book yet (I like to write my own first), but the whole time I was reading this, I was picturing the author getting raked over the coals for writing page after page of what feels like a pretty huge, glaring survivorship bias (wikipedia.org). Moore got rich investing in real estate.

There’s no question this book is interesting. I agreed with chunks of it and wanted to argue with even more chunks of it. I imagine that will be a typical reaction for most people. On the other hand, that might be psychological projection (wikipedia.org) on my part.

If I’m honest, I think I mostly read this book to confirm what I already felt to be true: the stock market as we know it is still very, very new in historical terms. Once something has been true for a couple generations (e.g. the stock market always goes up and will be a safe investment forever and ever), people treat it like a law of physics. But it’s not a law of physics and it will remain true only until it stops being true.

And this book had what I was looking for:

From Chapter 4: When inflation hit as a result of funding World War I, people saw the value of their money drop. They didn’t want to invest in the stock market (which was known to be a foolish and risky thing to do), but they didn’t have many alternatives. So they invested. Then we all know what happened in 1929.

Moore repeats the warning several times, including twice in the Conclusion: No method of investing always works.

Okay, now I’m fascinated to go see what other people thought of this book…​

Good lord, the Web is so full of slop. Maybe these are real reviews? In which case, I guess most people think this was very funny? Do I believe any of this was written by people? The slop is breaking my brain.

I can’t tell if any real human beings have ever read this book. For all I know, I’m the first person to ever read it and write a review for it online. Is this just what everything is going to be like from now on? I think I’m done with new books for a while. I’m seriously thinking of limiting my book reading to things printed before 2023. This is so depressing.