The Case Against Ownership
(I expect the headline of this subscriber-only post, and what I’m about to go argue, will be triggering for many of my readers. The goal isn’t to convince you that the WEF vision of you owning nothing is benign, but to explain why there are some very strong headwinds against ownership. I don’t want to give too much of that argument away, but in this premium post there will be talk of rented can openers, lime-green Barracudas, steak on a stick, sex toy counterpart risk, and why you should never bet against the wind.)
Some things you own, some things you rent. Because of course. That’s a statement so obvious it would seem to be unworthy of a moment’s thought. And in general, other than for really big ticket items like houses or maybe cars, we don’t think about it. If you’re one of my premium subscribers — and I thank you for that! — you rent access to this blog. Because of course. How could it be any other way? If you have a can opener in your kitchen’s assorted implements drawer, the one with a potato masher that occasionally prevents you from opening the drawer, you own that can opener. Because of course. No one rents a can opener. But hold on to that example, I’ll come back to why it might not be as simple as it seems.
The general rule we follow is simple. Anything you are going to use on an ongoing basis, if you can afford it, you buy it. Otherwise you rent. Services or experiences are almost always rented, like a massage, or a meal at one of those Brazilian Rodizios where you sit for two hours while guys with giant skewers of meat come by and carve off pieces onto your plate until your stomach hurts. And if you’re wondering about I miss the most since moving to a small town, now you know.
You may have noticed that many of the things you used to own are now much easier to rent. The big “disruptors” everyone knows about, Uber and AirBnB, made it much easier to rent someone else’s car (with driving services included) or rent someone else’s home. But the changes that made those services viable, including the ability to coordinate the actions of strangers at scale, also make it possible to “serviceify” many other things that were previously hard to offer except through outright sale. Before I get into those, and the many lifestyle and investing implications, let me take a step back and look the extent to which ownership itself can blur with renting.