The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

One of the most ironic things about the political revolution that manifested itself with battle cry " Make America Great Again " is its inherent ideological contradiction. Although  Trump supporters   never explicitly explain what " America " they want to bring back, implicit is the notion that they want to see again the dominant, stable U.S. of the post war II period. A country characterized by economic stability, a rising  middle class;  a country where people could pay for their own college education with a waiter's wage, and where corporate employees could rely on the certainty that their corporation looked at them as life partners who deserved to retire with juicy defined benefit pensions.  Where's the contradiction, you ask? Well, the political leaning of the era --the one that allowed stability and prosperity for its middle class--was markedly left-leaning: the New Deal  of FDR, the Great Society of LBJ. Even Republican Eisenhower knew better than go...

Nobody can really  take credit for having solved a problem that never happened. Any attempt at it drags you into the realm of non-existent hypotheticals and becomes moot the moment you open your mouth. This is the position leaders around the world find themselves in when trying to fight this pandemic. It doesn't matter how informed, intelligent, prescient our leaders might (or might not) be, they face the same fog of uncertainty when trying to predict the future while making decisions to fix a problem this complex. For better and worse, we're equipped with minds that can only draw on history to construct patterns when trying to face the future. And in a Bayesian dance , all we can aspire to do is to  tinker with our course of action as that fog of uncertainty chooses to spit the next piece of evidence at us. There is no other way. Leaders (simple humans* that they are) fall prey to the same  Law of Small Numbers ; forced to take action in the face of clouded, sm...

I am not really sure if we really appreciate the true brilliance of the The Wachowsky brothers'  The Matrix . Its prescience was uncanny. In 1999, they dreamed up a world in which humans were harvested for their energy, for the benefit of machines. A sentient, all-encompassing machine--originally created by humans-- developed a sense of self-interest and built an illusory world available solely to the sensory perceptions of their captive slaves, who were entertained by such illusion and kept in apocalyptic-looking pods --hooked-up to devices that fed the machine with energy. "Reality" was simply too shiny. Too engaging. Too real to look away from. You needed to take the red pill to wake up . At the time --and up until very recently-- my idea of it all was that The Matrix was just a very sophisticated criticism of Capitalism. A " call to arms " of sorts to all nine-to-fivers who despised their monotonous jobs, felt utterly empty and purposeless, and desperate...

Face it. We're all still playing catch up to the reality that this election laid bare. Our collective recency bias  kept us blind, thinking that what held true in the recent past (a corrupt, skewed political system serving a ring of cronies) would simply keep happening going forward. Never mind that the world's interconnectedness had made things inherently unstable . Or that it had already fed revolutions all over the middle east. That was them -- it seemed we thought . We're different.  Turns out, we're not. Now that the fire has reached home, we're scrambling for solid ground amidst this tectonic plate rearrangement. The Liberal World Order is under siege -- fascists are at the gates !-- and Fukuyama had it all wrong . The sense of loss and drifting is palpable. It's clear --by now-- why we missed it. But is it really clear why we got here ? Interconnectedness may have been the spark, and our yearn for belonging  may have exacerbated it, but the rea...