How a toilet works
Why do not investments come? Why does not the economy start? Why does the head of the Cabinet try to explain what never happened?
Possession as the iconoclastic essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, and behavioral psychologist Daniel Khanemn call it, to whom one must think fast,
to think slowly) is to explain facts that are consummated and unforeseen, with arguments according to which everything was predicted.
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Perhaps the answer is linked to what Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, also behavioral researchers, designate as an illusion of knowledge. In his work The invisible gorilla point out that this illusion manifests itself when you think you know more than you know.
Both they, and Taleb, see it especially in the activity of economists. Having familiarity with something and knowing the rudiments of its functioning does not mean understanding it. Often reading a text several times, or texts of specialists or filled with data and statistics generates a false sense of understanding.
From there, one's own knowledge is taken for granted and it is not thought necessary to subject it to revision. Therefore, when things do not work as that supposed knowledge indicates, the posdictions arise, never the rethinking. This week the Chief of Cabinet stated twice that the predictions announced for the second semester had been rigorously fulfilled.
To sustain the illusion of knowledge, statistics can be produced that reinforce it (it is known that statistics and surveys often show the results that the person in charge wants to obtain, for which all information or evidence that contradicts those results is skipped).
And you can insist on beliefs (which are not evidence), as, for example, that the real reality transits through social networks and not through the streets, homes (discard here those that are prepared as staging for timbre), conversations daily life of people of flesh and blood (no contacts in networks, trolls or other virtualities), places of work, means of transport and other spaces in which social humor is perceived.
Economics, and especially complex investments, move on the basis of unverifiable assumptions that are often presented as quasi-scientific. The issue is that the more situations are complicated and the forecasts are breached (which, in economics, should be called prophecies), the more complicated and incomprehensible the explanations become.
Of all the possible economic theories, says Taleb in Is There Luck? There will always be one that explains the failed past that was announced as a successful future.
But if you put the explanators in front of a boy who asked incessantly, "and why?", And then again, "and why?", It could be noticed that "they have no idea what they are talking about", as the investor Steve Eiman (there is no worse splinter than the same suit) in the book by Chabris and Simons.
The illusion of knowledge tends to lead, especially in the economic sphere, to dangerous promises, risky claims and disasters of great proportions, such as real estate bubbles, convertibility, the belief that you can consume without producing, spend on account of that you do not have or announce massive tax relief without having done the accounts first (or having done them wrong).
As the authors of The Invisible Gorilla say, it is not the same to know that if you press a button you download the toilet to understand how the whole toilet system works.
Without this last, the day that does not work will have to call a plumber who will charge very high fees for something that was perhaps avoidable.
In short, perhaps a high degree of illusion of economic and business knowledge impedes access to what these researchers consider an antidote. An external look, admit other possibilities and, going to the here and now, we could add that a good antidote is something that the economy usually does not contemplate. That behind the numbers (or rather, ahead) there are people. Politics deals with them when it serves the common interest and not a sectoral one.