What will be the next biggest growth industry, on the scale of this century's prior booms of cars, airplanes, communications, pharmaceuticals, technology and finance?

That darn stock market! Month after month, we all run hard just to stay in place. It seems to me that so much of the standard plays and standard industries and companys are stale. So what's the Next Big Thing going to be? I can answer the question with total confidence: I have absolutely no idea. All I can say — with a modicum of confidence — is that the industries that have grown so explosively in recent decades will continue to grow, but too slowly to create any real excitement. To be sure, the sectors that have been so creative and fascinating, that have created so much wealth, are hardly dead. We will continue to get ever-faster computer chips, ever sleeker laptops, cell phones that have still more features that almost nobody ever uses. Big Pharma will continue to provide us with new drugs, and my guess is that over the next couple of decades we'll probably see some huge breakthroughs: real cures for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. Because so many maladies afflict us, the room for treatments is nearly boundless.

That's all nice, but what about now? What about five or eight years from now? Don't you get the impression that we're in one of those frustrating in-between phases? We all know that American businesses are sitting on huge heaps of cash, and it looks like it's not about to start going anywhere interesting. Microsoft's recent announcement of a big dividend and a stock buy back was an implicit acknowledgement of this. Do you doubt that Bill Gates and his advisors have spent the past couple of years trying to figure out what to do with all those clams? Yet they could come up with nothing. Warren Buffett is in pretty much the same boat. Most stocks are priced fairly (or so it seems to me) and with the number of eyes examining every nook and cranny, your chances of coming up with a real bargain are very small indeed – which probably explains why Buffett is doing so little.

Since it appears that nothing is bubbling to the surface right now, let's look at the past and see if we can find a few clues.
What huge new industries have popped up over the past century? Cars, aviation, pharma, and tech. It's also fair to add that while finance has been around for roughly four hundred years, it's exploded in size in recent decades. Communications? That probably goes back to Mr. Morse, but it too has exploded in the past century. So it's probably fair to say we have seen six new — or mostly new — sectors arise.

Let's start with cars. There were lots of them around in 1900, and no doubt some dreamers thought that one day they would be everywhere, but in 1900 how many people really thought that within a quarter century there would be millions and millions of them in America, millions more in Europe, and that by the end of the century there would be hundreds of millions of motor vehicles on the roads in every part of the globe? How many people foresaw the consequences of this revolutionary change: the rise of the oil industry, the construction of roads (itself a huge business), all the repair shops, rubber, insurance, a revolution in warfare, and maybe even global warming.

How about aviation? The world went from one lousy little plane in 1903 to thousands of four-engined bombers in 1942, and one dropped the first atomic bomb in 1945. For decades we've had all the plane manufacturers, all the airlines, all the airports (and the construction thereof), and spinoffs like Fedex. Here's a trivia question: take all the privately owned aircraft in the United States right now. How many are there? Half a million maybe? Now think about when that number of cars on the road was reached. 1910? 1915? So within living memory (or just about) we've gone from that many cars to that many planes. Who in 1903 thought it possible?

What was Big Pharma back in 1900? No such thing existed. Back then pharma was … aspirin and…. laudanum? Leeches? Voodoo spells? Until penicillin got going during the Second World War, people in the most advanced nations died of infections resulting from scratches, not to mention tuburculosis. The explosion in this sector is staggering and will obviously continue. Who in 1900 could have anticipated such a thing? Or even in 1950?

Tech? How many people in 1970 predicted that by 1980 the personal computer would be common, that by 1990 it would be standard, and that by 2000 it would be everywhere? How many people in 1980 predicted that a dozen years later a potentially revolutionary change would begin in India because of its export of high-tech workers? In 2001 I was in the horrible little town of Trinidad in an obscure part of Bolivia, one of the most impoverished and unreachable countries on the planet, yet I was able to use my American ATM card to get cash out of the machines located on every corner.

Communications? In 2001 I was able from Ecuador to call my Bolivian girlfriend in Trinidad, she had a Nokia. How many Finns in 1985 predicted that within a decade their primary export would be cell phones? In all those old movies Humphrey Bogart was always getting a wire, but I've never even seen one. Do they still make phones that connect to the base via one of those cables that's always getting tangled? How long did it take back in 1850 to get a letter from London to Sydney? Back then a lot of those letters must have sunk along the way. The worst that can happen these days is that the call gets dropped.

Finance? It's true that Lloyd's has been around since the early Seventeenth century, and there were some banking powers — like the Fuggers — around before that, but the change over the past century has been incredible. A hundred years ago you had to be an aristocrat to run up a big debt, but now all you need is a pulse. While the local bank now has all the character of a discount shoe warehouse, the explosion in financial services has been a fundamental transformation. How many returning soldiers in 1945 had brokers, and portfolios, and at least a chance of getting a return better than that offered by a passbook savings account? (Hell, do teenagers these days even know what a "passbook savings account" is?) Most of those GIs wound up getting mortgages and building equity, something their parents could hardly have dreamt possible. In the late 70's a heavy day on the Street was thirty million shares, now that's a light five minutes.

So what's the Next Big Thing? As I admitted at the start, I have no idea. All I can say with confidence is that it will be a surprise. It may well be something nobody has invented yet. So what, you ask, is the "future paradox?" When people try to look to the future they can do so by turning in one direction only: backwards. All our thoughts are based on our experiences. When we try to think ahead we have no choice but to use our experience as a guide. We examine the past, and by doing so we try to chart a sensible course to the future, which is never knowable. Whenever futurists try to look forward, they find themselves caught in this paradox, and they have no option but to take past events and current trends and try to extrapolate them, and naturally this leads to all sorts of errors. I read the other day that in his story I, Robot, Isaac Asimov had his future scientists working with slide rules, yet the first electronic computer was invented only a few years later.

I just hope the Next Big Thing gets here fast, because I'm getting really sick of this trading range!