The one certainty in life is that there are no certainties in life… Apart from death and taxes… Oh, and the fact that some people never make mistakes. I mean, a few weeks ago I said that the election would be on April 12th, unless Mr Albanese decided to delay it because of the potential damage from Cyclone Alfred, and how that would mean that I was completely right, even though I got the date completely wrong…
Well, if you’ve been reading many of the political commentariat lately, that’s pretty much what they’re saying… For some reason this reminds me of the post-race, post-game analysis of gamblers: I was basically right about my prediction but the jockey/the coach/the players/the umpire did something and that changed the result so that my totally correct pre-game prognostications were right in all but their accuracy…
To be clear here, most people don’t use the word “prognostications” but I need to establish that I’m a pretentious bastard who uses words like that to sound like my prophecies are more based in educated thought than just a random guess which will sometimes be correct…
And I guess that’s the frightening thing: the future is so uncertain that it’s comforting to think that there’s someone out there who can reassure us that he or she knows exactly what’s going on. This is the appeal of a Donald Trump: His total lack of self-doubt is comforting, in the same way that a tarot reading that has you overcoming your present worries is more comforting than one that has you dying penniless and alone… You may not believe it, but it’s somehow nicer that it is telling you that things are going to be all right and you can relax and…
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about chaos theory and economics lately. Chaos theory, in case you don’t know, is the study of how small changes in a system can lead to huge, unpredictable effects over time. It’s often summed up by the butterfly effect, which suggests that something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings could eventually influence a hurricane on the other side of the world. Even though chaotic systems follow rules, they are so sensitive to initial conditions that their behavior seems random and unpredictable. Examples include weather patterns, stock markets, and even some biological processes. In other words, the simplest thing can lead to big shifts somewhere else but we don’t see how the simple thing caused the big shift, so it all appears as chaos.
Economics, on the other hand, is entirely predictable because we have economists telling us exactly what the effect of certain actions will be. Of course, not all economists agree the effect of each action will ultimately be, but this doesn’t mean that they’re not entirely sure that they’re right. I mean, they may not get the result that they predicted, but that’s simply because the theory may be distorted by people not following the theory and not understanding that certain actions will lead to definite outcomes. For example, the current low unemployment rate rate in Australia should mean that inflation is being pushed up and that’s why they’ve been unable to lower interest rates because any moment the reality will match the theory and if it doesn’t, then there’s some problem with reality because they can’t question the theory without sounding like they haven’t studied Economics…
Of course, there may, in fact, be a strong link between economics and chaos theory and if there is, it would explain why people seem to think that it’s dangerous to point out that Donald Trump has no fucking idea what he’s doing and doesn’t even understand who pays a tariff, but because he’s President, it would be a mistake to point this out because he may send your employer a survey about whether they have any employees who don’t understand how Tariffs will make America Great Again, just like it was back in the 19th Century when Britannia ruled the waves and the United States had a massive intake of immigrants… Mm, maybe not that last bit, but anyway… Your simple action may have consequences just like a butterfly flapping its wings such as you being declared a DEI hire because anyone who doesn’t support Trump can’t have got their job through merit and you need to be dismissed immediately!
The most dangerous thing about Trump is that there seems to be the idea that he has a well-thought out plan, rather than treating him like a drunk teenager on a Saturday night. “Harry has just crashed his father’s car into the fence while he was driving down to get more alcohol… I wonder what his plan was. I mean, did he crash in order to encourage someone else to drive him or does he have some plan to force his father to buy him a car so that he crashes his own car next time… Or was it because he thinks that the fence needs to be higher and he’ll be able to convince his father to build a higher one when it’s rebuilt?”
And the trouble is that, whatever happens, some in the media will be treating it as though Trump considered the likely consequences of what he does, when he has trouble considering the likely end of most of his sentences!
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