Economic Cycles, Miscorrelations Geared Towards Political Blame, and How to Become a Great Thinker

2025/01/17

zenx.blog

Summary: Market capitalism paired with effective antitrust and redistribution of wealth through good taxation and just government leads to equitable wealth increases which again leads to people's leniency towards more pro-social policies goes up. More public services become easier to afford in wealthier societies, and there’s a greater push for affording rights to everyone (e.g., LGBTQ+ movements, more social mobility with government hiring, pensions, UBI-equivalents, etc.). But disruptions cause incumbency bias that shakes up this trajectory—mortgage crises, the dot-com bubble, the ‘80s recession/inflation/energy issues, and especially COVID.

Even though the exponential curve trends upward, as the world gets more globalized and connected, it should naturally resist market disruptions (like COVID) better. Globalization makes it easier to cooperate and improve bottlenecks.

It’s unlucky that we were in a very economically prosperous decade pre-COVID, which allowed most governments to vote in left-leaning parties (because of the correlation between wealth and left-leaning policies). Then COVID happened, and those same left-leaning parties had to oversee the crisis. People started blaming the economic downturn on their policies, which is semi-true. Pro-public/social policies work better in times of wealth, but the left in some nations also supports free trade and market capitalism, which would’ve helped growth.

In the USA especially, people falsely associated the economic downturn caused by COVID with everything the left stands for and their social policies. The downturn wasn’t caused by the Democrats’ LGBTQ policies or foreign aid. It was the pandemic. Sure, other factors and bad policies from both parties made it worse, but most of the damage was still from COVID.

This theory holds up because, in countries where right-leaning/conservative parties were in power (Japan, South Korea, France?), they were also ousted and criticized. They just happened to be the ones in charge during COVID. No one is really at fault for the downturn during COVID. Maybe different economic policies could’ve softened the blow, but the damage was still inevitable. If anything, the USA and the Democratic Party oversaw the most successful economic recovery (GDP-wise, though inequality got worse) of any developed nation and is better off than most places.

2010s world was prospering economically -> nations got wealthier and voted in left-leaning governments because wealth makes people more open to leftist policies -> pandemic hurt the economy, and whoever was in power during it got unfairly blamed for all the bad stuff -> opposing parties got voted in regardless of their policies because people wanted to go back to "better times."

People posit themselves as "truth-seekers" and this causes them to miscorrelate. I respect and do not judge people for attempting to be fact-based and truth-seeking, but a lot of the time this is just confirmation bias in disguise. People will line up statistics (i.e. transgender populations) with economic statistics (i.e. inflation) and then blame the party in power and miscorrelate policy effects.

TLDR: Increase your competency in systems thinking (whether it be in politics, academics, career, etc.) by changing the order of magnitude in which you operate in; think long-term. Most people make decisions and assumptions (political or not) by only *one* of the following: people, policies, statistics, or personal afflictions. Second order of magnitude thinking is connecting 2 of these, and third order of magnitude thinking is connecting >3 with abstract, generalized knowledge and theories (you could probably make this more advanced with 5-6 different levels and connection genres, it's just a simplified theory for point of explanation). The best way to start with improving this is to be a learner. Learn random topics and theories -- take interest in the obscure. After being a learner you can become a thinker and start taking your random learnings and connect them with other ideas (as mentioned earlier) and come to your own novel ideas or truly fact-based opinion. If you are highly conscientious, ambitious, and agentic on top of all of this, you are pretty much guaranteed to be successful and/or change the world.