Author: A.T.

“Recently you wrote about the S&P 500 Index stock on the Amex. [Symbol: SPY, acronym SPDR, otherwise known as “spiders.”] I would like to know whether there is/are similar stock for the NASDAQ composite or other foreign market indices? Thank you in advance.” — Vichai Rojanavanich

So far as I know, there are two SPDRs and 17 WEBS, all traded on the Amex. The SPDR I wrote about (symbol: SPY) mimics the performance of the S&P 500. The other (symbol: MDY) — which may be an even more interesting choice now that the S&P 500 has had so many indexers piling into it — mimics the S&P MidCap Index of somewhat smaller companies. WEBS, meanwhile, are geared to mimic the performance of various single-country markets overseas. I don’t know of anything like this on the NASDAQ has just now.

Okay, okay, there aren’t any indexes on the Falklands or Newark — but wouldn’t those be the symbols if there were?

At the risk of repeating most of my earlier points, I think these “index stocks” are outstanding.

• Their low annual expenses are comparable to Vanguard for similar products. This gives them a hefty built-in advantage over actively managed funds, not to mention the tax advantages they share with index funds (i.e., they rarely sell, and thus rarely expose their owners to as much taxation as actively managed funds do).

• Unlike closed-end country funds, they are designed to keep premiums and discounts from developing, which gives you one fewer uncertainty to try to weigh. (Not that I mind buying country funds at a big discount. But buying them at a small discount is risky, because it could become big.)

• These index stocks also have the advantage of being marginable and shortable (or is that a disadvantage?).

My friend Less Antman opines: “There are, of course, brokerage costs for buying and selling these index stocks, but I think they make great buy-and-hold investments for IRAs. And WEBS, in particular, give one the chance to bet on certain countries. I may experiment personally with the ‘mean reversion’ data I’ve talked about — this notion that over time, strong outperformers or underperformers revert to their historic average performance. The current Journal of Finance reports a study that confirms that a valuable investment strategy may be to invest for the next 3-5 years in the countries with the worst performance of the last 3-5 years: WEBS are the perfect vehicle for executing this strategy. I’m going to figure out which 4 countries had the worst results over the past 3-5 years; I think Japan is going to be on the list and the United States isn’t!”

So maybe Japan and the U.S. will do a little “reverting to the mean” over the next few years, and Less will be the richer for it. This ties in a bit with what I was saying yesterday.

“And though I’m not the one to do it,” Less continues, “I wonder if there is a low-risk arbitrage available on the WEBS to buy one of the actively managed closed-end country funds selling at a deep discount (Germany comes to mind) and short the related WEBS stock. The problem is that these discounts often persist for a long time. Also, while waiting for the gap to close on a discount, the annual expenses and extremely high brokerage costs incurred by the actively managed closed-end product may eat away at profits. And those sickening rights offerings dilute shares as well.”

It’s an arbitrage, in short, Less is smart to recognize and even smarter to avoid. But not the WEBS and SPDRs themselves. They are a good deal.

Yesterday, in reviewing some of my birthday gifts, I told you why stock in Tiffany may have climbed so high (though not whether it would climb higher — I keep my record of predictions near perfect by making them all retrospective). But that was not the point.

I promised to stagger around today until I finally got to the point. So let me just tell you about a couple more birthday gifts first, which will eventually get us there.

From my partners in Moscow I got two amazing things. First, a matryuzhka, one of those great hand-painted Russian dolls-within-dolls-within-dolls. Only this one, far from having Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnez, et al, inside each other — or even Bill and Al and Hillary and Tipper and Chelsea and Socks, or (my personal favorite) Homer and Marge and Bart and Lisa and The Baby — this one had a fat-faced lobotomized fellow on the outside whom, I slowly came to realize, was me. And inside me — me again, this time holding up a pack of Camels, as I once had in Russian TV commercials, saying “Nye Kuritye!”(Don’t smoke.).

However bad I looked (I looked bad), you’ve got to admit this is a pretty great gift.

The other thing I got from Moscow was a 5-minute video with actual news footage of the “Great National Celebration of Feeftief Burseday Andrew Tobash” (the narrator did his manful best). There were people marching in the streets, fanfare, amusing if suspect translations (could the people really have been holding up banners celebrating me?), sequences inside the offices of my little advertising agency, and finally a big “Kheppy burseday, Endi!” from my partners and all the employees. (We’re up to about 80 now; please let me know if you need a Russian advertising agency or have some computer graphics you’d like done on the cheap.) I was blown away.

And still I roam aimlessly, not even approaching the point.

It is time to home in.

Which brings me to my last birthday gift, the one I got for myself. (Oh, what the heck, I figured, you can’t always be a total tightwad.)

My surprise party had been held at the Sony building in Manhattan. (The printed invitation read, in huge letters, SUPRISE!, my boyfriend being a big-time designer but not a big-time speller.) It seems you can rent the Sony store after hours, slap some old home videos on 100 video screens, and crank up the band. Sony makes a little money on the rental and gets 200 potential consumers to troop through the sales floor on the way to and from the party. Smart, these Japanese. (And now, ever so gradually, I am finally getting to The Point.)

As one of those 200 potential customers, I got a glimpse of Sony’s shiny silver pocket-sized digital camera that stores up to 108 snapshots (108 good ones, because you can review and delete the bad ones as you go) on a single “roll.” Except of course there is no roll. It’s digital. You download the “shots” onto your computer and then print them out on your printer (or onto a special little printer designed to print near-professional-quality glossies specifically with this camera). Or maybe you don’t print them at all, you embed them in your e-mails or make them available to anyone who “clicks here.” (I have not yet learned to do all this.)

Yes, Kodak and Polaroid and a smaller firm whose name I forget have their own nifty, considerably less expensive models — I saw those at CompUSA and almost bought one. But Sony’s seems to take the cake (as for $850 it should). Among its dozens of clever little features is the rotating lens. Face it forward and you take a picture — as man has been doing since ancient times — of what’s in front of you. Flip it around and you take a picture of yourself and whoever’s standing next to you. This eliminates the age-old need to find some friendly passer-by to take the picture for you. What’s more, because you don’t squint into the viewfinder as you do with a traditional camera — you just look at the camera’s postage-stamp color video screen that you hold out in front of you (and doesn’t that take a little getting used to?) — you can get your face looking just the way you want it to before snapping the shot. Jim Carey could play with this thing for hours.

And, yes, it tells you when you need a flash, which is built in. The battery is rechargeable (and costs only slightly less than a trip to France). You can set it for “rapid fire” to shoot four frames in succession if you’re taking an action shot . . . and then delete the three that were too soon or too late to capture the instant bat hit ball. And more. It is, in short, amazing.

Which got me thinking: don’t count the Japanese out. Their economy and ours may have traded places somewhat — remember a few short years ago when the value of the Japanese stock market exceeded our own, and we imagined we would soon be ceding our global economic preeminence? But it’s never good to get cocky.

I love my new Sony camera. And around the same time I noticed some stories about Toyota’s aim to become the world’s number one auto maker, and how one of its new Lexus brands is outselling Caddy’s Catera two-to-one. (I like the Catera ad campaign. If my 1992 LeBaron didn’t have another five good years in it, I would seriously consider buying one.)

Not that Detroit is quite as important to our overall economy as it once was, or that there isn’t plenty of room for Sony success in a prosperous American economy. Indeed, it’s always important to remember that a healthy Japanese economy is good for our own, not bad. So we want lots of great Japanese products to buy here, just as we want the Japanese to take the money they earn from that and buy some of our great products.

Still, the point is just that, for those who assume there will never be another U.S. recession (economist David Bostian, who has an impressive and iconoclastic record with these things, predicts one beginning later this year), that U.S. corporate profits will never dip, that there will never be another bear market, and so on . . . well, just remember the economic news may not always be quite as good as it is today.

The future is wildly bright, to my eyes. But it’s not time to get cocky — any more than the Japanese were smart to get carried away a few short years ago when there was no cloud on their horizon.

I’m not saying we have gotten carried away, certain Internet stock bubbles notwithstanding (many of them already long since pricked), just that there is always that danger. Save for the future; live beneath your means; when it comes to investments, buy the best relative values, and don’t limit your horizon to the U.S. It’s a big wonderful world, of which we are only a big wonderful part.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned my surprise birthday party. It wasn’t actually a surprise; between one well-intentioned friend and another, I wound up knowing not just the date but the time and place of it in advance. I felt bad about that, because either I was going to have to disappoint people by not being surprised, or else I was going to have to fake it.

Drawing on decades of experience seeing friends’ movies and plays, reading their manuscripts, and going to their art exhibitions — most of which have been superlative, but not all — I finessed it pretty easily. “SurPRISEd?” I echoed incredulously, grinning and gaping, when asked by guests whether in fact I had been. “Surprise is not the WORD!!!”

But pretty soon I dropped that when I realized that, though not a surprise as to time and place, it really was, nonetheless, a complete jaw dropper. There’s my high school soccer coach! Clunk. There’s my partner from Moscow! Clunk. (By the way, this is the sound of my jaw dropping, in case that was not clear.) Oh, my God, there’s [a famous TV person]. Clunk. And on and on.

So it was a great surprise after all, and I’m still enjoying it, although that’s only 90% of the point of this comment. (There IS a point; you just have to be patient.)

Best card I got: “Why did the 50-year-old cross the road?” above a nice photo of a road. Open the card: “No particular reason. People your age tend to get disoriented from time to time.”

Best gift: Too close to call. I got a zillion terrific gifts (making any good liberal feel all the more guilty for his good fortune, but let us not veer there again), half of them from Tiffany. (Could this be the reason TIF is up so much from its 1995 low of 14-1/2? The dawning notion that all the baby boomers will now be turning 50 and that as they do, — millions and millions of them — Tiffany will be supplying half the silver clocks, silver key chains, silver bookmarks, silver business-card holders? Does TIF have farther to climb? Does silver? Who makes those blue bags and boxes?)

But this isn’t the point either. Come back tomorrow and I will surely have staggered around to it. (I’m sorry, I don’t usually do this to you, but people my age tend to get disoriented.)

Tomorrow: The Point

There was always the notion that, going into a bear market (not necessarily to say America will ever again experience one), it’s nice to own stocks that pay high, secure dividends — the dividend cushions the fall. Two reasons:

• Partly it does so simply by virtue of that quarterly check you get. A stock that drops 6% but pays a 6% dividend has, after a fashion, and after a year, broken even.

• More important, cushion-wise: for such a stock to drop by half, say, the dividend, if secure, would come to represent a 12% yield. Most of the time, stocks don’t pay dividends like that. Ergo, the stock will not drop by half — as without the dividend it otherwise might. The high dividend serves as a cushion.

Anyway, that’s always been the notion, and people seem to remember it. But in today’s environment, I’m sorry, I can’t help it — it makes me laugh.

Here is Dr. Stephen Leeb, in one of his newsletters, recommending Fannie Mae. “During rough markets,” he writes in part, “the company’s market beating dividend yield of 2.3% should support prices.”

Hello? Fannie Mae is a fine outfit, and its stock may be a buy under 41, as Leeb recommends. I don’t know. But the two things that jumped out at me were, first, that 2.3% is “market-beating” . . . and second, the notion that nervous investors would take comfort in that fat yield. The stock could fall by half, which would double the dividend as a percentage of the stock price, and still be yielding considerably less than Treasury bonds, real estate investment trusts (REITs) and utilities — less, indeed, than even tax-free municipal bonds.

So this isn’t a comment on Fannie Mae. But it may be a comment on what today passes for a market-beating dividend, and what that says about the market as a whole.

(In the very old days, stocks were expected to yield more than bonds, to compensate for the extra risk. I’m not sure that made a whole lot of sense, and it probably makes even less now. But it’s an interesting bit of history.)

Here’s what may be a great solution to the backup problem. I’ve never had a backup crackup myself, but picture it: all your records are on your computer, but your hard drive crashes. Ayeeeee! No problem? You are faithfully backing up to floppies every night? How do you think floppies hold up in a fire?

Many of you are far more computer literate and/or adventuresome than I, but for those who are not, I’d suggest your checking out www.connected.com and downloading the software and taking the free trial month. You don’t even have to give them your credit card unless and until you decide — as I did — to become a customer.

The basic cost is $15 a month, so it’s clearly cheaper to back up to floppies (which I do occasionally anyway) and then store those floppies under the cushion of the diner where you have lunch every day. Unless the whole town burns down, you should be OK.

But the advantages of www.connected.com are two or three or four. Maybe five.

• First, you can set it up so that it automatically backs up your data files every night when you’re asleep, or just Tuesday and Friday — whatever. Or you can do what I do: set it to remind you every time you leave Windows, so you can decide whether or not you want to do a backup. In short, if you’re someone who knows he should back up often but never does (you know who you are!), this solves the problem.

• Second, your data gets stored so far “off-site” that the fire would have to be of the Armageddon variety to destroy both your hard drive and theirs at the same time.

• Third, they have the capacity to send you back your data on a CD, which is a roundabout way of getting all your files onto a CD — and also a comfort if they should ever go out of business. Presumably, they’d at least do it gracefully enough to allow you to get a copy of all the data you had stored.

• Fourth, if you travel with a laptop, as I do, you can access your “backups” without having to fly home and grab the floppies from your drawer.

• Fifth, maybe you have a small group of whomever — a club, a family, a small business, a cult — and your mind glazes at the thought of installing a transglobal network. Well, if you give each member the encryption password, each will be able to access any or all of your/their backed up files.

The main drawback I see is cost — it will be $15 a month or more, so it’s not for people on a shoestring. (And even with this neat service, I still plan to back up to floppies once in awhile and print out my annual financial stuff at tax time each year.) Speed is another issue, but at 28.8, a great deal of data can be backed up in a fairly short time. After your first backup, only files you’ve changed get uploaded.

As between this system and a Zip or a Jazz drive (from Iomega), I prefer this. The 100-megabyte Zips almost became part of my life, except that I seemed to experience an occasional glitch — undoubtedly my fault. I just remember feeling inadequate and frustrated a few times. I may still pull them back out and start using them again. The Jazz drives, which store a billion bytes on a single chunky (if you’ve seen the little sucker, you know what I mean), are even more astonishing. But only after I bought two, one for each place, did I realize that, unlike the Zips, they require a Scuzzy card, installation, etc. — and at $500 each, well, I was pleased to return them for credit and buy an amazing new digital camera instead.

Anyone who follows this column regularly knows that neither my financial advice nor my computer advice is guaranteed to be anything more than enthusiastic. Still, I thought some of you might want to experiment with the www.connected.com free trial. Problems? Questions? I got through to Connected’s customer support on two rings each time I tried: 800-647-3078. (Of course, they hadn’t just been written up in my column that morning.)

The market capitalization of the Coca Cola Company (KO) flirts with $150 billion as we speak. (You don’t think we’re speaking? Can you honestly say you didn’t utter an audible "wow" when you read that last sentence? So did I. We’re speaking.) The market capitalization of all the publicly traded companies in Russia is about $50 billion.

I’m not saying you should sell Coke if you own it in a taxable account — though you might want to write some covered calls against it.

And I’m not saying you should invest in Russia (although I’m happy to have said it in the past, when it was even dramatically cheaper than today).

But looking at the two side by side makes you wonder. Even with a billion additional consumers being added to the planet every dozen years — most of whom will be born craving Coke, one presumes — could Coke really be a bargain at $150 billion? Could Russian stocks, while obviously very risky, not still represent an interesting speculation?

Larry Johnson sent this April 15:

“This being ‘tax day,’ I think we as investors should start a new tradition: Just as the Irish were green on St. Patrick’s Day, we Americans should start wearing black on April 15th to represent our mourning for the American taxpayer. I think the only thing the Clintonians despise more than the military, are those of us that work for a living or have the insight to be called ‘investors.’ Not only have we elected them, we re-elected them. They are only a reflection of what America has become. We can only blame ourselves. Sad, sad, sad. God, we need a revival!”

I wrote back: “Thanks, Larry. Having grown up in the Eisenhower days, when the top federal rate was 90%, and then the Nixon and Ford days, when it was 70%, I don’t know that we should hate President Clinton for taking it back up to 39.6%.

“Remember, he has shrunk the federal payroll and the federal deficit far more than Reagan/Bush, who expanded both. And it hasn’t been THAT bad a half-decade for investors since Clinton was elected (Dow more than double?).

“Go a little easy on the old folks, for whom a good chunk of the tax revenue is collected; and on the Army (and the debt for our prior buildup to win the cold war), which is not unimportant; and even on poor kids, who get another chunk of your tax dollar. No really successful society manages without a public sector and a fairly high tax burden to finance it — and to share some of the spoils of its success.

“Hope this doesn’t make you too angry.”

To which Larry replied:

“Naw!!! Too thick skinned for that! All I know is that I’ve been working my butt off (after it was nearly shot off!!!) full time since I got out of college in 1972 and that I’ve paid my FICA out every single year, a couple years I had it paid out before tax day!! (which we both know I’ll never see that money again). I would rather just walk down the street from the office and hand the cash to the first street drunk or bag lady I run into than be forced into the system we have now. On top of that, up until the Clintonians landed on the planet and gave us the biggest tax increase in the history of mankind, I’ve always managed to eke out a refund for the same number of exemptions. Now, I’d have to lie to do it (which I refuse to do). However, you are right in what you say. They really put it to us for quite a few of those years. This is the greatest nation on earth and it does allow us to be able to go to college, work, invest, etc. For that, I’ve fought and killed and will always be thankful for the privileges this country affords me. But it breaks my heart to see what’s happening here, and when you’ve got a joker like this in charge one really has to wonder. Like I said, it appears the very things that make America great, they despise: entrepreneurship, investors, and the military. Unfortunately, I have very strong roots in all three and make no apologies for it and never will. America is still the greatest in spite of the aliens we now have in charge. I have almost reached the point where I’m about to give up climbing any higher on the corporate ladder route as there is really no incentive left for me to do it. Why should I work so hard only to pay more taxes and everybody else’s bills? I’m seriously thinking of turning a particular hobby of mine into a profession (most of the startup costs have already been incurred). I know it will pay a whole lot less, but the stress of the high paying corporate management job (not to mention the potential heart attack, high blood pressure, short life) will be history. Plus, by using my business, I’d get to pay a whole lot less in taxes, be happier in what I’m doing and probably live longer to enjoy life to boot. Life is too short to have to become a slave to a system that tries to kill you before you can enjoy it. Hang in there, Andy. You have a certain sense of humor that really makes my day. Don’t worry about making me angry….as long as you’re not shooting mortar shells or bullets at me or trying to tax me to death, you’d have to go a long, long ways to the left. Even then, I’d defend your right to your opinion.”

How can you not like this guy? We’ve probably never voted the same on anything in our lives, but he is obviously the salt of the Earth.

I won’t take your time rebutting his comments, except to say I suspect the President appreciates investors, entrepreneurs and the American military a lot more than Larry thinks. And that Larry will get some Social Security, even if not quite the good deal we’ve been giving our parents and grandparents. (Compared with what they paid in, our grandparents have made out very, very well.)

As for quitting the rat race, if Larry is sure his hobby will support him in the basics, it sounds like a great idea. Happiness doesn’t correlate directly with Adjusted Gross Income!

If you want to know what makes America great — well, you already know, but if you enjoy being reminded — don’t forget to watch Ellen on ABC tonight at 9 (8 Central).

In what other largely-white country would the most highly paid ($80 million a year?), best respected talk show host (now that Phil is off the air, there’s not even any contest) — Oprah Winfrey, an African-American — be guest-starring on a sitcom in which the lead character, Ellen Morgan, played by Ellen DeGeneres, comes out as a lesbian?

“Yep, I’m gay,” read the cover of Time a couple of weeks ago, with Ellen’s photo.

The point is — obviously — that in America, every good citizen is respected regardless of . . . well, everything. Not that it always works that way in practice, but almost everyone agrees it should. Equal rights and fair play.

The other thing that’s great about America is its ability to change. Until recently, many people thought being gay was (a) a choice and (b) a very bad one. Like choosing to be an idiot or choosing to have everyone despise you. This wasn’t tremendously logical (who would choose to be despised?). Nor did it resonate with most people’s personal experience (most people did not remember a time when they were overwhelmingly attracted to people of their own sex but chose instead to be attracted to the opposite sex).

But taboos run deep.

Anyway, this being America, in a few short years there’s been a tremendous shift in public opinion, not entirely unlike the shift in thinking about equal rights for women. IBM has joined the growing ranks of major corporations adding “sexual orientation” to the explicit list of grounds on which they are committed not to discriminate and providing spousal benefits for same-sex partners.

Of course, much of the country still needs time to get comfortable with this — and should not be too harshly criticized or mocked for that. It’s a lot for some people to get used to — especially those who don’t realize that some of the people they already know and like happen to be gay (like Ellen). As one letter to the editor of the Tampa Tribune put it — speaking for many:

“This country continues to spiral downward in moral decay, each day getting worse and worse. Who cares if Ellen is coming out of her little closet? I for one do not and do not want my family seeing all about the so-called alternative lifestyle on TV. People have to take a stand. My family will not watch it, and I’m willing to say many more households will not.” — Johnny Johnson

Or this, to the same paper:

“Ellen” will be aired during the ‘family hour.’ This is not a family show! According to the media, we are supposed to accept same-sex lifestyles, and if we don’t, we are considered ‘homophobic.’ I do not enjoy being in the company of homosexuals, nor do I want them around my children. At one time my views would have been acceptable – even the norm – but now I am considered intolerant and homophobic. I also do not want my children around a pedophile, and yet I have read that it is a tendency that these people are ‘born with.’ Does this make me a ‘pedophilaphobic’? Thank you, Chrysler, for taking a stand and not sponsoring ‘Ellen’! –Cheryl A. Wonderly, Clearwater

It’s not hard to sympathize with Cheryl, but it’s also not hard to see how, with time, she will come around. For one thing, someone is bound to point out to her — be it Ellen or Oprah or Reader’s Digest, or whoever — that pedophilia is repugnant because when a grown man preys on a little girl or boy, he’s clearly doing something terrible to that child. No one is likely ever to ask Cheryl to be respectful of pedophiles, let alone want them around her children. But where is the inherent harm in two adults loving and caring for each other? Who is the injured party there? Most child molesters are heterosexual, yet surely Cheryl wouldn’t object to her children being around heterosexuals, just because some exceptionally tiny proportion of them are pedophiles.

If former Alabama Governor George Wallace can have come around the way he did with blacks, it’s going to be a relative piece of cake for Cheryl to watch Ellen one day and, despite herself, start to laugh . . . and even like her again. Of course, it may be a rerun by that time, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Enough. Being gay myself, I can get very boring on this topic — but not Ellen. Apparently, it’s a very funny episode. ABC. Tonight. Nine o’clock.

“As one who has so often recited the mantra ‘you can’t time the market,’ how do you justify your April 17 column? Isn’t the right answer that, especially for a retirement account (depending on the age of the investor), one should stay the course — perhaps adding, as you suggest, real estate to the portfolio but definitely NOT moving to money market vehicles in a futile attempt to time some future market rebound?”

I guess the short answer is that there are exceptions to every rule. (And “especially for a retirement account” the exception is easier to invoke, because it entails no tax penalty.)

If everybody put all his/her money into the market, and Social Security put its trust fund into the market, and the Chinese realized the way to get rich was by investing in the U.S. market, and the Dow hit 30,000 by next June — surely even then all of us who have said “don’t time the market” would agree that it’s time to lighten up.

So then the question becomes: when do you draw the line? The reader said he wanted to be out of the market, and I neither encouraged nor discouraged that, just tried to respond to his question about where to put the money.

But the kind of reader with a question like that may be just the kind of reader who very likely SHOULD get out. Staying the course is only good advice for people who really will (and, at these levels, perhaps not good advice, in tax-sheltered accounts, even for them). There are millions of relative newcomers to the market who’ve gotten used to its amazing performance over the last decade and a half. Let’s say I had discouraged this fellow — “Don’t sell!” — and let’s say we have a “regression to the mean,” where after 15 years of way-above average performance, the Dow dropped 40% and stayed there for a few years, putting it back in line with its historical long-term growth.

I’m not predicting that. I’m really not. But it’s certainly not out of the question. Do you think people like the reader in question would just patiently hold on an extra ten years? All my experience tells me that, typically, he would not; he would sell at the bottom . . . and be really, really angry I had talked him out of selling.

I did advise in PARADE several weeks ago (when the Dow was over 7,000) that those who have profits that can be taken without tax consequences in retirement plans might want to move half their holdings into short- to intermediate-term Treasuries and/or international equities.

I don’t usually do that — you’re right. But all I can do is offer my best judgment. If I’m wrong, it won’t be the first time!

Yesterday, I described the thrill of riding as the only passenger in a Gulfstream II that comfortably seats a dozen — making excuses right and left, as any liberal would, for the inequality and wastefulness of it all.

Some of you will doubtless write in that I’m a fool to buy into any of that liberal guilt nonsense; others will say that I am a sell-out to the aristocracy and that with the cost of the fuel for that trip alone we could have built a school in Somalia or freed seven Tibetan monks by bribing some prison guards.

I leave you to fight among yourselves. I had a great time.

(My actual feeling is that you’re both right — to a point — and that the “truth” lies, as it so frequently does, someplace in between.)

But as a board member of Zero Population Growth, I do think about some of these larger issues. (ZPG, I hasten to stress, as I have before, advocates voluntary ways to find a sustainable balance between the earth’s population and the environment.)

Clearly, if what it takes to be happy is your own jet, we’re in big trouble. In an ideal world of 10 billion happy people (because if we reach the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman tomorrow, the earth’s population won’t level out anywhere near today’s 6 billion), that would mean 10 billion private jets flying around. Not gonna work.

Even if we figured that just one in 500 people would have one — the reward for being at the tippy-top of the pyramid — that would still mean 20 million private jets flying around. Not likely.

But let’s switch from jets to lobster. I’m not sure how many lobster there are in the sea, and I recognize that with proper techniques we may be able to farm them like chickens. (I would also point out that though high in cholesterol, it’s the good cholesterol. And that you’re really missing something if you don’t eat the green stuff. [Andrew Tobias and your Internet service provider assume no liability for any green stuff you may eat or any adverse consequences suffered therefrom. This is Mr. Tobias’ personal commentary and does not constitute a recommendation of any kind.]) Still, if you figured that each of the earth’s future 10 billion would eat 3 lobsters a year on average, that would be 30 billion lobsters a year we’d need to harvest from the sea. Can we do that without wiping out the species?

Obviously, life would go on even without lobster, and no one says everyone has to have access to lobster — or fresh air or clean water. Or even that, if everything works out right, we can’t develop the technology and political harmony to provide virtually unlimited lobster — and clean air and clean water — to tens or even hundreds of billions of people.

Still, my instinct is that adding a new China every 14 years, as we are now doing, makes improving the average person’s quality of life a more difficult task than it would otherwise be.

And what if we switch from jets and lobsters to wonders? Just as every Muslim hopes to visit Mecca at least once in his or her lifetime, would it not be reasonable to envision a happy time when everyone on the planet gets to see Yellowstone National Park, or Mount Kilimanjaro, once? If the average visit were just a day (I think it’s longer), then that’s 10 billion visits to be spread over 75 years (the average lifespan of those 10 billion visitors, say), or about 350,000 visitors a day to each place. If you figure the average visit to such unique attractions would be two days, then figure you’ll be enjoying these great natural wonders with 699,999 fellow visitors. Want to go only on Spring Break? More crowded still.

At the Pyramids, where we’ll assume people stay just half a day, that would still be 4,000 tour buses arriving twice a day, parking discreetly off to the side someplace so as not to be noticed. Have you ever seen 4,000 buses? Hard to hide. (And to keep this schedule, a new bus would have to arrive every 5 seconds.)

Of course, with virtual reality, people will be able to “visit” the Pyramids and just about anything else without actually having to visit them. And one can even now “climb” Mt. Kilimanjaro, after a fashion, watching a travel tape while working the Stairmaster.

Nor need one actually visit these places in any event to have a happy, comfortable life. Like so many simple pleasures from “the good old days,” to which, on balance, most of us would not like to return — churning your own butter, writing a letter in longhand with quill pen by candlelight — it may be that “real” tourism will in the future be reserved for a tiny proportion of the population, while the masses have it created for them (wonderfully) by the Discovery Channel and more and more Disney theme parks, with those wonderfully convivial thirty-minute lines to take the four-minute ride up the “Amazon.” (Don’t hold me to any of the specifics, I haven’t been to Disney World in a long time — and I still can’t get that cloying “It’s a Small World” theme song out of my head.)

But in a sense it is a small world. And these are the kinds of crazy things liberals (and many conservatives and virtually all conservationists) think about as the population grows. Can we physically feed and clothe and house 10 billion people if we can feed, clothe and house 6 billion? Sure we can. Twenty billion, 40 billion. Whatever.

But are we that generous that we want to share the planet with so many more people?

Surely if we got word there were 200 billion humans in a far off galaxy, who, for whatever reason, wanted to emigrate to Earth, we wouldn’t say, “Come on down! Our earth is your earth!” Naturally, we’d love to have their ambassador and their hockey team . . . maybe even 100 million tourists coming for a few weeks at a time (again, Disney would thrive). We’d be tickled pink at the notion that not only is there intelligent life in the universe, it turns out to be just like us. But a billion of them coming to stay every dozen years?

If I were a lobster, it would make me very nervous. Even as a human, I’m not unconcerned.