From The New York Times:

EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS
Some Things I Don't Know, and One Thing I Do
By BEN STEIN

Published: January 15, 2006

WE'VE had a lot of material lately in this column about interest rates and money supply and inflation and oil and other mathematical money matters, so now maybe some loftier subjects are in order. Consider this a little letter of investing advice to the fathers of young children who are maybe divorced or separated or who may be still married but are far too busy with the daily grind or the playoffs or the boys at the bar to spend much time with their kids.

Not long ago - on New Year's Eve, in fact - my writing partner and financial adviser, Phil DeMuth, came to visit me in Rancho Mirage with his wife, Julia, and their adorable 5-year-old daughter, Olivia. We had New Year's Eve dinner at our club. (It's a club for older people, and we celebrated New Year's at 9 p.m.)

Olivia heard me talk about how great the view of the stars is from our backyard. When we got back to our house, she asked if she could go look at the stars. Phil, Olivia and I went out to the grassy area behind the house - actually, the 14th green of the club's golf course. I told her to look up in the sky. "I can't see," she said, although the stars were gleaming like the signs in Times Square.

Phil said, "I'll hold you on my shoulders," and lifted her up onto his 6-foot-5 frame.

"Ooh," she said. "Now I see all the stars. They're beautiful."

Now, I thought, the distance from Earth to the nearest of those stars is trillions of miles. Having been put on her father's shoulders added an incalculably small fraction to Olivia's closeness to the stars. But it made all the difference in the universe that she was standing on her father's shoulders and she was being lifted up by his love for her.

That's it, I thought. With our fathers lifting us up, we get encouragement, belief in ourselves, confidence that we can reach out and grab the stars for ourselves. Without our fathers lifting us, we are out in the yard in the dark.

It was an especially poignant moment for me because, the night before, I could not sleep. To soothe myself, I counted all of the jobs my father had gotten me, the homework he helped me do, the articles and books he helped me write and the advice he had given me about life and about money. It was a long list, and I fell asleep when I had barely started. I dreamed that my father was back, alive and smiling at me instead of having died in 1999. In my dream, I fell to my knees and begged him to never go away again. He smiled and laughed and then disappeared, and I woke up in a sweat.

There is a lesson in these year-end vignettes. It is a lesson that has something to do with money and something to do with something bigger than money. And it's all about really meaningful investments, but not necessarily with money. I have to approach it with appropriate modesty, as usual, learned from my father, who was obsessed with how little he knew.

Lately, I have been thinking about how little I know about finance and economics. I think I know more than most people, but there are some huge subjects that I know nothing about. For example, I don't see how we are ever going to slow down the current account deficit, which is currently approaching $900 billion a year against us. I don't see when the acquisition of American assets by China, Japan and the petro states will end.

My father used to famously say that if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop. But will it stop with the United States being a colony of the major exporters? Will it stop with the dollar worth one-fourth of its current value? I keep thinking that America started as a colony and that maybe we are going to end as a colony. I know that's far-fetched, but I don't see how a nation that behaves like a college student who has just gotten his first credit card will ever see international solvency again. There must be an answer, but I have no idea what it will be.

Likewise, average real weekly wages in the United States have risen a miserly real 2.5 percent over the last 10 years after being adjusted for inflation. Wages in American manufacturing are constrained by competition, mainly in Asia, and this restraint ripples through the whole economy except where prices can be fixed, such as in the executive suite and at law firms. What will happen in America as wages stop rising and social friction grinds without being lubricated by generally rising prosperity?

How will we solve the health care crisis? The federal government is already tapped out and the medical establishment is bleeding America white. Where will the money come from to insure 40 million uninsured?

I also have no clue what the solution will be to vast inequality among racial groups in America. The solution would seem to lie in the schools, where the gap between the graduation rates of blacks and whites remains so stubbornly wide. There must be a solution, but what is it?

SO, as I say, there is a lot I do not know. But I know that investment in your children is usually a pretty good investment. I do know that it pays off big - although you don't know it when they are teenagers, I assure you. I know that investment in your parents pays off all the time.

Phil DeMuth is the smartest investment manager I know. His results with my paltry savings have made me very happy. But even he cannot predict the market with a little bit of precision. He can, however, predict that his daughter will remember the night he showed her the stars from the desert.

Or let me put it another way: None of us can predict or read the future. But we can read the past, and we can learn from it. That glowing moment on the 14th green under the stars, New Year's Eve 2005, and all of the gilded memories of parents and children, of those we loved when we still had them with us - they'll all be gone and we'll be alone and wishing we had done more with them. Or we actually can enjoy them more now, while we still can. Happy New Year.