This Is What Happens When You Put An Idiot In Charge of a Complex System

[Minimalist]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opini...e=Homepage

When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality

Trump can’t run America by yelling at people. Who knew?

Let’s face it: Make America Great Again was a brilliant political slogan. Why? Because it could mean different things to different people.
For many supporters of Donald Trump, MAGA was basically a promise to return to the good old days of raw racism and sexism. And Trump is delivering on that promise.

But for at least some Trump voters, it was a promise to restore the kind of economy we had 40 or 50 years ago — an economy that still offered lots of manly jobs in manufacturing and mining. Unfortunately for those who trusted Mr. Art of the Deal, Trump never had any idea how to deliver on that promise. And even if he had a clue about policymaking, he couldn’t have changed the long-term trajectory of our economy, which is moving steadily away from making physical stuff and toward providing services.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that in this case Trump wasn’t actually trying to scam voters. My guess is that he genuinely believed that he could bring manufacturing, coal mining and so on roaring back, that others had failed to do so only because they weren’t tough enough.

You might wonder where his confidence came from, given how little he obviously knows about economics. The answer, probably, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: inept people are often confident in their abilities, because they’re too inept to know how badly they’re doing.