Voters are morons. The president has vanishingly little ability to control the economy. Even the fed, who have significant power to affect economic policy, have little power to bend it to their will.
The economy we experience today is the result of the sum of decisions around the world being made today, and for the past dozen years. Even the most powerful people on earth are just a breeze against the runaway semi truck that is the economy.
I know I’m not the only person who watched the movie idiocracy, but “the ‘conomy” is polling at the top of the list of issues for this election cycle.
Just once I’d like to see an actual economist debate some politicians who love act like them, despite having no qualifications and nothing but a list of talking points to back them up. We can all hope that this new crop of temperature readers will help educate JP and the fed about monetary policy.
I would prefer a system where the candidates setup a hierarchy of experts and advisors. The experts then debate each other on their policy positions - both long live debates and by exchange of essays. Then, a third party sums up key position differences and the two parties get to revise until they are satisfied - basically a list of policy differences. Finally, every voter takes a test where the questions ask them to assign policy positions to a candidate - e.g. "Which candidate's team supports X". The top 20, 10, 50 whatever percent of votes are used and the rest are discarded. This system lets us know that the voters know who they are voting for.
Oh, and that team of advisors and experts needs to be installed somehow in the cabinet. You wouldn't want a candidate to just get a team of persuasive people to get elected and then ignored.
The president and the Fed have enormous power over the economy. If they spoke carelessly and spooked the markets, they could cause a crash any day of the week. Look at what happened in the UK in their small economy, and imagine how much worse it would be if the US president did it.
The Fed's low rates are also largely responsible for the way the economy behaved since 2008.
The economy is like a running a relay race. Major players have significant power to screw it up, but they have little ability to fix screw ups caused by someone else.
It's beyond even the economy. Surely voters realize gas can't cost $4 forever? Even if we continue never increasing the taxes on it to match inflation, or road spending?
The discussions just around this one commodity, where the average person has major influence on their own consumption, are mind boggling.
If I go back to my rural hometown, people will tell me with a straight face that the EPA should be abolished so that we can have 99 cent gasoline again like the late 90s.
Yes, if it were any different they would need to register as lobbyists.
A disinterested yet divided electorate illustrates how well things are going since people focus on major differences with minor significance rather than sweating the details of minor differences with major significance.
If I do all the research, understand all the issues, and make a well informed voting decision, I get the same reward as if I randomly vote for the candidates with the shortest names.
A good-faith reading of a statement like "voters are morons" almost always takes it as an approximation, sufficient to describe the bulk behavior, not an absolute universal quantifier.
That might be a good faith reading, but it's not the most plausible. The most plausible is that the writer means that most other voters but himself is a moron
I went through the math on the expected value of a vote in the last election [1], and if you're in a swing state I found that the expected value of your vote is surprisingly high. I estimated that a voter in Pennsylvania in 2020 would have had an expected value of about $3000. Of course, as with the lottery, the probability of a payoff is extremely low.
I'll be honest, I didn't read your expected value article. But did it take account the difference in power voters have based on number of electoral votes per state? For example, Wyoming has 3 electoral votes and only 580,000 people, while California has 55 votes and 40M people. Wyoming has more than three times the voting power per person than a resident of California.
Yes, I did take that into consideration. Pennsylvania was the best case for a voter in 2020 because it had the highest likelihood of being the tipping point state in that election. But I also tried to estimate the expected value of a vote in California and got a number around 60 cents. So the expected value can can vary by nearly four orders of magnitude depending on the state you are in.
The main factor in this discrepancy is not so much the number of electoral votes, but the partisan lean of the state. Am election that ends up being decided by a single vote in California would imply that there were extremely unexpected results in other states. But your expected value in Florida is much higher because it would not be unusual for the election to be decided by an extremely close result in that state.
Interesting - I went through the calculation based on "chance the election would be decided by one vote; my vote" and it's pretty damn vanishingly small. (I assumed any election decided by a single vote would be decided by my vote, which isn't entirely fair, and ignored appeals, etc), but didn't value it on election spending but instead on "changes to me".
The economy we experience today is the result of the sum of decisions around the world being made today, and for the past dozen years. Even the most powerful people on earth are just a breeze against the runaway semi truck that is the economy.