THE HAVENS THESIS
Understanding an unravelling world.
The Havens Thesis is simple.
In a destabilizing world, there will be a flight towards Havens.
To test this thesis, at Havens, we developed what’s probably the world’s first Civilizational Risk Index. It took several years to design, and synthesizes many of the world’s highest-level datasets, whether from universities, financial institutions, central banks, global bodies, and thinktanks, including the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, OECD, UN, Federal Reserve, and many more. It offers a new lens of where the world is today, perhaps the world’s first at the largest of macro scales.
So Havens begins with a very different theory of the world. Most still assume: the world will be the same as it was before. Havens Thinking says: we’re at a turning point in history. The world is changing dramatically. We now face shock after shock. Our systems are struggling to cope, and at times, beginning to break down. And we need a way to think about where we are now, at a civilizational level.
I’m different from many economists, too. My work’s been focused on rethinking economics for the 21st century. For over a decade now, my models of the economy have predicted nearly ever major global event, including Trump’s first and second elections, America’s descent into autocracy, Brexit, the rise of the far right, rising stagflation, the breakdown of the post-war order, and many more. Havens is based on them. I’m going to (literally) show them to you in a moment.
I created the Civilizational Risk Index so that we could begin to see whether the theory above is true or false. What does it reveal?
The Index tells us that Civilizational Risk has risen to severe levels. Slowly, at first—and then, in a rapid acceleration. That’s a quantitative finding. You can sense it in the world around you today, which feels like it’s unravelling.
And that leads us to a very different way of thinking about the future, wealth, economics, and civilization itself, not just a dismissive “everything will be fine!” when we all sort of know deep in our churning guts that it’s not.
CIVILIZATIONAL RISK AND HAVENS
What is Civilizational Risk?
It’s made of five forms of risk that are now sweeping our world, resulting in the most unstable era since the 1930s.
Macropolitical risk: the sudden, sharp decline of democracy into autocracy, and the breakdown of global order.
Macroeconomic risk: the fragmentation of the global economy, as trade wars erupt, and the world decouples from America.
Macrofinancial risk: financial markets are growing more fragile, volatile, and concentrated.
Macrosocial risk: people worldwide are losing trust and faith in social, political, and economic institutions, and social bonds are rupturing.
Macroplanetary risk: we are on a trajectory of nearly 3 degrees of warming, whose consequences will be unprecedented and severe.
These are Macro Risks.
They’re not at the micro level, which means about individual companies, stocks, bonds, products, services. Will Nike make a successful sneaker this year? Will Facebook’s users grow? Is this bond worthwhile? Is this CEO going to do a better job than the last one? Those are micro risks, and they’re what we’re used to. They’re also what most investment portfolios are based on—most of economics and finance assume that risk diminishes rapidly, and eventually stops, at this level.
It doesn’t.
Macro Risks are what are seismically different about our world today. They affect entire countries, economies, industries, financial markets, trading blocs, political forms, center-periphery relationships, axes, or the world. They last and endure over long periods of time. In periods where Macro Risk rises, and begins to dominate micro risk, the world feels unstable, because, in truth, it is.
A civilizational transformation is unfolding. The old geopolitical order is coming undone, the global macroeconomy is fracturing, and financial fragility is exploding.
Think of how America’s in a steep descent. How the world’s running away from Trump. That exemplifies the Macro Risks above spiraling out of control. America’s political institutions are broken, its economy is struggling, and bonds have ruptured dramatically.
Here’s how that looks formally. Don’t worry about the symbols—they’re just formal notation used to begin symbolizing Havens into a little equation. I’m sharing this with you because over the years many people have asked me to share my models.
Havens was designed to hedge against the risks above. It is built on a new, civilizationally synthetic model of risk and return, and that is how it’s designed from the ground up for the turbulent world we are in now.
In this way, Havens is a new paradigm.
THE HAVENS PARADIGM
So is the Havens Thesis true? In a nutshell, yes. That’s why Havens does as well as it’s doing. (You can read more about that in the Havens Effect.)
Let’s now put thesis in another form.
The Havens Thesis:
In systems and structures which reduce Civilizational Risk, real long-term wealth will rise.
Conversely, in systems and structures in which Civilizational Risk accelerates, wealth will disintegrate. Their real wealth will shrink.
At the level of your portfolio or mine, but also at larger and larger scales, too.
That is what Havens is really about. Here is what it says. The real wealth of civilizations and societies can grow over the long term, but it can fall, too. If too much of what we do is extractive, predatory, or destructive, then our wealth will always be at higher and higher risk, too. Eventually, it will disintegrate into lower forms, and that is what a world or society unravelling around us is.
The paradigm I’ve taught you here is for creating Havens, too. In that way, Havens isn’t just about “making money.” Nor is it for the kinds of people who are only interested in that. I didn’t create it for that reason. This was never a sales pitch. It was made with love, for the people I care about, for civilization, the future, and for all of us.
Havens was designed to grow not just my wealth, or your wealth, but wealth itself, at a civilizational level, because we are at a dramatic turning point in human history now. That is the paradigm hidden inside it. And Havens is for the kinds of people who care about all that, too.
If that’s you, welcome.
Love,
Umair (and Snowy!)