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There is recency bias and headline bias in the way that we process information. Which means the proximate causes frequently are considered and mistaken for root causes. We really are angry about something in politics right now and therefore it must be the political leader that I am seeing talked about all the time. That person must be responsible.
Trump is not a root cause of most things. He’s a proximate cause. The root cause is much deeper. You want to understand how did your country get to the point that it decided to vote for someone as clearly unfit for office as that person. And I may have just offended a whole bunch of people by the way that are watching. I want to be clear. I felt that way about Trump when he was a Democrat. The point is he was obviously unfit in a way that other Democrats and Republicans that had achieved that level of influence were not.
How did that happen? And it turned out that there were lots of reasons, underlying reasons for decades that made the United States different from other countries that led to that decision.
How did Brexit happen? And so many people didn’t think it was possible. Looking at root causes really matters. Why is there so much gun violence in the United States as opposed to lots of other countries that have many of the similar problems? Why in the US is there such a pervasive culture of gun violence?
There is an enormous focus on recency bias, and that means that proximate causes are frequently considered to be the reason that something happened.
I will say that my bias is, as someone who is a political scientist that looks at macro trends, is almost always to try to at least understand the underlying structural issues. Are they centralizing or decentralizing? Are they getting bigger? Are they getting smaller? When did they start? How important are they? They’re forces, some of which are unidirectional, some of which are cyclical, some of which can be random events.
Understanding the nature of the structural forces on an event, for me, is usually a good way to start trying to understand the nature of that crisis. That doesn’t mean that individuals don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that an individual leader doesn’t really move the needle. We see it happens all the time. Zelensky is a unique figure in Ukraine. A different president would have a very different outcome. But still, before I look at Zelensky I usually want to look at what led to this conflict. Why did it play out the way it did? What were the external pressures? And once you have that landscape then you can start looking at proximate causes.