Hysteresis

 Many of you who "stumble" onto this post may not know what the meaning of the word "hysteresis" is and that's ok. I'm and engineer so I'm familiar with the concept from electronics, and inductors to be more precise. The phenomena of hysteresis however, applies to more than just natural systems but has applications in economics too.

I'll explain. Hysteresis is the phenomena where a device, system or organism when subjected to a change or stimulus has a (potentially) expected reaction but there is a significant time delay between the two. In the context of our political system, it means that usually the person in charge in period one, is responsible for whatever happens in the next person's tenure. This could partially or totally. The reasons for this are relatively obvious to most of us. Some policy choices and decisions just take time to implement and then promulgate through a massive economy.

Why am I bringing this up? I keep hearing people trying to blame the current president for inflation and other economic woes after 2 years in office. If my theory is right, we're just now feeling the impact of decisions and policies that were put in place in the last administration just as trump experienced good times while he was in office as a result of the Obama administration. The effects of the Obama administration were probably even more cemented into our economics because he was in office for two terms. 

I'm not an economist so I don't really know just what the delay, hysteresis, is due to radical changes in policies actually is, but I suspect it's measured in years. What happened in the previous administration that are now heavily impacting our current situation? I probably cannot come up with them all but some that I can think of include poor handling of the pandemic, cozying up to Putin, robbing the poor to pay the rich, isolating the US in global markets without any plans for remediation and this constant false notion of America and Patriotism. All of these, to name a few, have taken time- albeit some of them, like the Patriotism bit (you know "stop the steal"), were pretty short periods- to show their effects on the US as a people and on the economy. I think this is because the "deplorables" were already waiting in the wings.

It's natural to blame the President of the country for all of its ills but the reality is that nearly all of the ills began well before the President took office. As countries go, the US can change on a dime whereas most other countries may take years to change. This is due to our relatively short democratic elected official tenures. Let's see, Putin has been the head of Russia for 30 years now?? The US has probably had at least 4 complete administration changes in that time. The two party system worked pretty well for a while in the sense that change was slower so the changes didn't seem so dramatic or draconian. Now however, we get one party in who makes a bunch of changes and then the other party gets in and tears them all down again. We're not longer keeping up with the times but rather reversing the hands.

The point of all this was to merely point out that blaming the current President for any ills you're experiencing right here and now, is mostly ludicrous. It's also selective because if you are pro-life (in as far as unborn babies go) and blame Biden for inflation, then you must also congratulate him for the Dodd decision- whether he supported it or not. Do you see how this works now? The point is that one side of our political system consistently uses double standards to reward a given administration about, well just about anything by leaving out the important bits. My big fear is that the other side will now start doing the same thing out of desperation. At that point, you may as well let the military take over.

If you've ever seen any Jordan Klepper videos, it re-enforces something someone told me long ago which is that, "you can't argue with a dumb guy."