This was a great read.

I think this also explains a lot of Trump’s appeal to a lot of disconnected voters; he’s promising to handle all the things that they (have been conditioned by Fox News to) dislike, without them needing to actually understand those issues, and without ever asking them for their input or requiring them to think about effects or harm or morality. If thinking about politics and economics and inequality sounds exhausting to someone, he’s not just promising to fix things, he’s promising to handle the cognitive load for them. I’ve met so many Trump voters who don’t even know what he’s doing, not because they only follow news that masks his actions, but because they just don’t follow news at all, and just “trust he’s taking care of things”. It’s relief from participation in the everyday political economy.

Also, Revealed Preference Theory is such junk science. Samuelson was just applying what people throughout history have observed about people not always understanding their own preferences, or not wanting to state them openly. It wasn’t supposed to be a way to use individual actions to assert predictive certainty of future actions.

It makes me depressed to think about how much damage has been caused by people who got into a field for the money but who had no aptitude for or understanding of the work, and just ended up wrecking shit. And I’ve met too many c-suite executives to think this is not an endemic issue in our current society. If there’s a better argument for jobs requiring some public proof of proficiency than our current crop of billionaires, business executives, and politicians, I can’t think of it.