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What is it: Irregular Ideas -- A look inside the ongoing conversation between Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin.
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In the upcoming send, we’re talking about Gould’s Full House, a societal Hoskins effect, and why we’re increasingly optimistic. Here’s a preview:
The Full(er) House: Living in Distributions, Or Why Our Fault Lines Have Fault Lines
“Our search strategy did not find any randomised controlled trials of the parachute.”
- Smith et al., BMJ 2003; 327
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
- Arthur Conan Doyle
“Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.”
- Imre Lakatos
“Everyone is so tense. I would be scared to confront people.”
- Chris Vanderpool, Walmart greeter, Fayetteville, N.C (quoted in NYT)
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Summary: A drumbeat of good news begins in January. Here’s how we get from here to there.
Last quarter we wrote about the subcritical society, the idea that a post-virus society is twitchingly ready to go racing off in unexpected directions at the least provocation. This status tells us a great deal about what’s happening, and what’s likely to happen next.
As a reminder, the current subcriticality is largely a function of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has frayed societal nerves, but it’s also tied to other epiphenomena, like the current US election cycle. Compulsive extrapolators have used the current societal instability to posit the arrival of a “new normal” -- a fundamental reset in how we restructure economies and societies. There is a utopian yen among “New Normalistas” to declare the past prologue to a work from home Zoom-future that, as it happens, they kinda, sorta always wanted in the first place.
This is an error, one that is causing confusion and creating new tensions. We cannot say this loudly or often enough. While we described the homeostatic pull of America’s desire to get “back to normal” in our last note, we, if anything, underestimated its power. The New Normalistas are on the wrong side of this bet, and it will end badly for them.
To explain why, let’s start with the source of some of the current confusion...
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