In Praise of Wishful Thinking
The TUni Multiverse opens a new world of convenient possibilities.
“Don’t worry, be happy.”
- Meher Baba (and popularized by a Bobby McFerrin hit)
I spent 3 days at CERN recently, capping off a course on deep tech venture creation that I teach for INSEAD. CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider. At 27 km in circumference, it is the world’s largest particle accelerator designed to explore the world’s deepest unknowns. Uncovering the origins of our vast universe. Detecting the tiniest, most elusive particles of matter. Measuring dark energy and black holes. Creating a globe-spanning network called the internet.
The progress of knowledge at CERN is based on the scientific method: a rigorous adherence to observation, hypothesis and testing. This method is taught in first year STEM programs and followed by all reputable research centers across the globe. When conducted objectively its findings can be reviewed and reproduced by peers repeatedly, and the conclusions considered definitive. Penicillin, solar power, the detection of gravity waves; none of these are possible without the scientific method. The simple but demanding framework also strengthens our theories in domains as diverse as economics and geopolitics. Observation, hypothesis, testing, and repeat. Solid.
Freedom from rigor
I, for one, am relieved at our change in political fortune, for it marks a liberation from the onerous demands of the scientific method. Its demanding framework under which knowledge has blossomed since Newton gets in the way of the most prized alternative: wishful thinking. The world faces a host of vexing challenges – the climate continues to change, viruses spread, prices rise, dictators invade – and that these could be resolved (or simply denied) with a snap of the fingers is certainly aspirational. The incoming regime has an agenda to meet, quickly. Wrestling with the complexities of climate change, pandemics, inflation, and wars will get in the way. Time for a bit of wishful thinking.
Team Trump operates in a parallel multiverse of alternate facts and established principles. (For a brilliant short introduction to the multiverse by science writer Brian Greene CLICK HERE.) The conventions that govern science, economics, and geopolitics in our standard universe (let’s call it SUni) don’t temper ambitions in the Trump universe (TUni). There is no need for knowledge and doctrines based on decades of observation, hypothesis, and testing, which can run frustratingly counter to the president-elect’s priorities for self-glorification and financial gain. It's a fresh and fluid perspective we all can embrace.
Just a few of the irritating annoyances we won’t need to put up with in TUni.
Vaccines
The US led the world in Covid cases and deaths, the latter topping 1.1 million as of mid 2023. The NIH estimates that at least 232,000 of these fatalities could have been prevented during just the 15-month peak if the unvaccinated had sought out just one injection. (Vaccines have been saving lives and reducing illness around the world since the invention in 1796 for Smallpox. Their safety and efficacy as a bulwark against infectious diseases have been thoroughly studied and well-documented for the past 220 plus years.) But vaccines are a pain! Appointments, and getting to the center, and was your previous shot a Pfizer or Moderna? Ahh, exhausting!
Should a new pandemic emerge (Avian Flu and Monkeypox have epidemiologists drinking heavily through their wine cellars at the moment), we won’t have to worry about vaccines in TUni. RFK Jr., tapped to direct American health policy, insists that vaccines cause autism (universally discredited in SUni) and accuses Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates of "a historic coup d'état against Western democracy", by having promoted vaccines as the best defense against Covid. Instead, we will be popping ivermectin (an anti-parasitic treatment to deworm livestock) from the comfort of home and as Trump says, “it’s going to disappear, one day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” Wishful thinking, easy peasy.
Wars
The war in the Ukraine is about to hit its 3-year mark and the pounding in Gaza exceeds 14 months. The toll on life and property has been unimaginable for all: the good guys and bad guys and particularly the civilians caught in the middle. The combined death toll among non-combatants approaches 60,000 and the US bankroll will top $200 billion in the next few months. Hostages are murdered and children starve. Totalitarians dream of empires of old. Extremists dance the dervish to antediluvian homelands and califates. In a world of global trade and corrupt leaders, the lines between ally and enemy blur. Negotiating with world leaders and jihadists tormented by fantasies of predestination can be, well, complicated!
But not in TUni. Trump will sit Putin and Zelenskyy down mano a mano and force a settlement that “I’ll have that done in 24 hours.” The plan, outlined by JD Vance in September, invites Russia to keep all the land it has grabbed illegally to date and in return Ukraine will promise not join NATO or the EU. Huh?
“If history teaches us anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.”
- Ronald Reagan
In political science the word for this is appeasement, and through decades of experience (observation, theory, and testing) we understand it’s efficacy. Indigenous Americans attempted appeasement with the arriving hoards through treaties, alliances, and trade to preserve their tribal lands. That didn’t work out so well. In 1938, Chamberland and Daladier appeased Hitler over a sliver of Czechoslovakia, who quickly resumed his march through Poland and the rest of Europe. And post WW II, Europe offered little reproach to Stalin’s territorial ambitions in the east, resulting in a domino fall of satellite puppet states and decades of Cold War turbulence. In all instances, self-delusion on parade. Wishful thinking shows a poor track record in SUni.
“I know Putin well,” Trump avows, and in TUni Putin’s word is gospel. Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia (former Soviet satellites widely speculated to be next in Putin’s crosshairs) might want to get on the TUni train, and NATO as well. By dint of Article 5, NATO will be required to come to these Baltic states’ defense should bad shit happen. Putin wouldn’t do that, right? Better sleeping through wishful thinking.
Prices
The mechanics of economics have been well tested and boringly reliable for the past 100 years in SUni, since JM Keynes (Johny-boy to his friends) was kicking around Cambridge and pondering the Great Depression (so, how the hell did that happen?). The dismal science offers strong views about lots of things involving public spending and trade, tariffs included. The effects of tariffs have proved so ruinous to economies on both sides of the spat that most all countries (164 to be exact) have signed on to the Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), created in 1947 to end tariff wars and ensure free and open trade.
Tariffs cause inflation. It’s simple math:
Old Price of a good with no tariff (say, your next dishwasher from XYZ Corp.)
+ tariff % (essentially a tax)
————————————-
≈ New Price of same good under tariff (so XYZ Corp. can preserve its margins)
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
- Alber Einstein
This uncomplicated algebra, suffered painfully pre-Great Depression in SUni (during an American policy of isolationism), doesn’t add up in TUni, and praise be to god. Our close allies and global trading partners need a proper come to heel debasing, and under TUni math they will happily absorb the tariffs and not pass them on to American consumers. SUni economics is for gloomy losers. TUni economics is for wishful thinkers. Stay hopeful.
There are plenty of other vexing issues prime for a TUni multiverse. Immigration, unemployment, climate change, misinformation in the media, gun control; all of these are complicated challenges requiring tested policies based on best practices forged through years of mistakes and correction. Effective policies often require negotiation, compromise, and serious amounts of time to implement, in a SUni multiverse. No worries, just wishful thinking.