BOSTON, Aug. 12, 2011 (DPI) — Investor Jeremy Grantham is renowned on Wall Street for his sweeping intellect and his provocative big-picture pronouncements in memos to clients.

And the 72-year-old co-founder of Boston-based investment firm Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo is still making people think beyond the next quarter:  In an essay penned by an academic friend published this week in The New York Times, Grantham asserts that this already overpopulated world will vie increasingly for scarce resources over the next century. Further, capitalism, he says, is ill-equipped to deal with its impact on the earth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-grantham-profit-from-ecological-mayhem.html

Of course it is all compelling reading: The contest over the world’s commodities is just beginning, Grantham says, and a Malthusian, run-out-of-resources economics could eventually take hold.

The author of the Times essay, Carlo Rotella of Boston College, jokes that we may have to annex Morocco if we want to secure valuable phosphate supplies in the decades ahead.

Grantham’s thinking is so broad and long-term that it’s a kind of economics on a geologic scale, which reporters of most stripes would have neither the patience nor the ability to interpret effectively.

That he allowed a friend, a Yale PhD., to write about him — an arrangement in which a draft can be read prior to publication — reflects some distrust of the media.  Perhaps Grantham has a right to be distrustful: The Times-written headline  “Can Jeremy Grantham Profit from Ecological Mayhem?” is almost a snicker that’s not reflective of the overall piece.

Grantham gives an excellent interview in late 2010 to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1640401359