10 antiProphecies for 2025

Don’t worry! I am not going to throw at you yet another manifesto for a world revolution, degrowth communism, environmental breakdown, or political revolution. There are all great. I am going to talk about how we are talking about our economic system. It seems many of us are talking past each other, especially when we imagine the future, especially when we are giving ideological labels to each other.

This time around, I give you anti-prophecies, which is a way of talking about the future without ideological labels and with awareness of our mental biases.

#1 Labels mean different things to different people

If I call myself an ecosocialist, those who know what ecosocialism is may think I am a good guy. Most of my fellow Romanians who were old enough to live under the totalitarian communist regime in the 1980s may think I am delusional. How the heck can I be a socialist after all those crimes done by communist regimes?

Or when we think of a capitalist, do we think of Elon Musk, or of a family-owned small business? By some standards, both carry the label capitalist because both are private owners of the means of production. One owns a few hundred billion worth of capital. The other owns perhaps a few hundred thousand.

Or take Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist. Why does he feel the need to say that, when the vast majority of socialist literature advocates strongly for democracy? Sure, we can say the former Soviet Union, as a socialist country, lacked severely in democracy. So does China today. For this reason, some humans label themselves democratic socialists, to give some clarity to their label.

But, are they successful at clarifying their label? A democratic socialist in the United States is the equivalent of a moderate capitalist in Sweden. Therefore, labels are context dependent. Is there any context in which Kamala Harris may be considered a socialist? Or is there a context when Donald Trump may not be considered a fascist?

Even if you are rejecting any labels, your label will be that you are an anti-labelist. You may be judged as a political independent in the United States, or a humanist, or a bicyclist, or an industrialist, or a philosophical ophthalmologist.

We often think labels are used to describe our identity, and to some extent they do. When identities are assumed to be attributes that we carry over longer periods of time with small variations, then labels become much less effective at describing who we are. In these critical times, when neofascists win elections, when we risk losing entire ecosystems, when wars over territory and resources are imminent, we must find ways of speaking much less with labels, and much more with attention to what really matters in life: values, morality, relationships. Having label-less debates is a much more constructive approach.

#2 Confirmation bias

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics. Since I am an economist, I will pick for you some biases and see how we can use them to do anti-prophecies about the economy.

From this huge list, let’s start with confirmation bias, which is my one of my favourites. It’s under the category “we are drawn to details that confirm our existing beliefs”. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms your prior beliefs or values.

Regardless of our label as a far-left Trotskyite or a far-right libertarian patriot, our brains execute confirmation bias all the time. We select information that supports our views when we read everything that immigrants do as a bad, regardless if it is actually bad or not, even by objective standards.

We ignore contrary information, when we promote the idea that capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty but do not also share the actual facts, that show the opposite is true. Reports coming out of the members of the Atlas Network constantly display examples of confirmation bias. Fraser Institute just put out another report that says Growth in government employment outpaced private employment in 8-of-10 provinces in Canada from 2019-2023.

As if that is something bad. It confirms their belief that employment must grow more in the private sector. It confirms their belief that government should employ as few people as possbile. They don’t say that actual jobs were created. Who cares where, as long as people are making a living?

We interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting our existing attitudes. Some economists who recently won the so-called Nobel in economics, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, write that there is evidence that links economic growth to democracy. They do not explain the causality, they just show you a graph. Does democracy cause growth, or does growth cause democracy? Which one is it? They do not tell you about Thomas Sankara, a former President of Burkina Faso, who was assassinated because he wanted to kick out greedy capitalists from the country. They do not explain this long list of US-backed right-wing military coups in Latin America.

They do not explain the success of China, they do not explain how austerity measures imposed by the IMF and World Bank kept former colonial countries poor.

The confirmation bias may be intentional or not. Both good humans and evil humans do it, with various degrees of self-awareness. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. When we think about the future, it’s important to ask ourselves: What am I confirming to myself by judging an economic policy in a certain way? What values do I hold so deeply that I want them confirmed by my family, by society, by the government?

#3 Dunning–Kruger effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. My favorite example of this bias is the overwhelming confidence of mainstream economists in economic growth and innovation. When I read headlines like this one [US-Europe economic growth divergences to widen further, IMF warns] I ask myself why do mainstream economists overestimate the ability of economic growth to fix all the problems.

 I think it is a matter of competence. Experts who do not know about degrowth, who are energy-blind, who ignore the fundamental doctrines that keep the economy alive, cannot possibly have the ability to give correct solutions to the problem. Obviously, nobody can know everything, and be aware of all the links between inflation and energy, unemployment and prices, natural resources and supply chains, democracy and wellbeing, money and wellbeing.

Politicians are prominent examples of having the Dunning–Kruger bias. One famous American fascist former president believes he alone can fix it. This may come from megalomaniacal narcissism, psychopathy, absence of empathy, or may simply be caused by class privilege, and hoards of sycophants.

The apparent historical success of capitalism to create wealth gives the impression that it can continue to do so indefinitely. When scientists show facts, over and over again, that the environmental degradation has been caused by the human economy, you get mainstream economists and tech gurus to kick the can down the road into the future. If we just innovated better, we will have even more prosperity, so they say.

Direct air capture is such a technology. It’s supposed to separate carbon dioxide from air. But in reality, it is outrageously expensive. At more than $500 per ton while Canada emits 708 million tones of GHGs per year. That’s 354 billion dollars a year to remove all those emissions. Not to mention the laws of physics constrain how cheap air capture can get.

#4 Hindsight bias

The hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.

The stock market is the breeding ground for the hindsight bias. Billions of dollars are invested in prediction modelling to help brokers and investors guess the trends in prices, the valuation of assets, the return on investment. Yet with all these models nobody can actually predict future trends. After an economic recession happens, there are hoards of experts telling us they knew it was coming, they knew the crash inevitable.

The subprime mortgage crisis led to the collapse of the US housing bubble which caused the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist, has won awards for predicting the Great Recession and back in March 2024 he also predicted a 15% probability that the US will have another recession in 2024. It hasn’t happened yet. But if it happens, he can surely say, I told you so.

There is a lot of “I told you so” in the business of predictions. It’s funny that you can say “I told you so” only if your prediction turns out to be true. But if it doesn’t, then your prediction was just a guess, and no harm done. The hindsight bias is praising the prophet only if he is right, and ignoring him when he is wrong.

Is there danger that even climate models can suffer from hindsight bias? Sure they can, because even scientists have human brains. However, we have this beautiful thing called the scientific method, which is supposed to protect us from biases. When it fails, which happens more often than we want, it can cause real damage for society.

#5 Just-world fallacy

The just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve", that actions will have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor. The perfect example is the obsession with meritocracy as a system of rewards and punishments.

Our entire economic system is built on this bias which explains success and failures.  If we really want to unpack what is behind merit, we must also investigate the notion of free will. As we already learned from Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined, it is impossible to find any brain cells, any neuron that have an activity which was not caused by something else, whether it’s genes, chemistry, environment, or culture.

In this sense, humans do not have personal freedom to regulate their behavior. If there is no personal freedom, or free will, then how can reward or punish the activity of a brain, over which its owner has no control?

The economic system itself uses a form of merit on large scale. Successful companies deserve their profit. Companies that make mistakes, deserve bankruptcy. You reap what you saw.

Victim blaming can lead to severe lack of empathy. It happens all the time when we judge harshly the unemployed, the people using welfare benefits, those who lose elections, those who lose money at gambling, sorry, I meant the stock market, but it’s the same thing.

Realising that our moral system does not emerge from nature, but it is a construction by humans, for humans, with no objective measure to it, helps us resist the just-world fallacy. Even better, we develop stronger resilience to whatever the future will throw at us, when we identify that we are not in control. The laws of physics are.

#6 Recency effect

The recency effect is a cognitive bias in which those items, ideas, or arguments that came last are remembered more clearly than those that came first.

Does it come as surprise that political candidates in debates prefer to go last when they deliver closing arguments? Is it a shocker that we accuse only Hamas for triggering the war in Gaza, but do not remember the decades of apartheid perpetrated by the state of Israel? Or perhaps we remember the 2007 great recession but we forget about the 2001 dot com bubble, and all previous recessions. The Great Depression from the early 1930s is subject for documentaries. We don’t feel it into our bones. It’s not recent enough.

Perhaps even the Holocaust is not recent enough for some fascists and right-wing fanatics that still deny it. It is almost irrelevant if the recency effect comes from ignorance of the past or with conscious denial. The end result may be tragic: it ends up in antisemitism, in Islamophobia, in the election of fascists and criminals.

Or take Tik Tok. Obviously, one-minute videos do not help much with developing the long-term memory of the young generation. In 2050, by the time we must have phased out all fossil fuels, the Tik Tokers of today might have forgotten completely why we were doing that in the first place, how it all started, and who did it. Or, dare I say it, what is life good for?

In defense of Tik Tok, we could argue that those string dances are a form of rebellion against the system. More than half of Gen-Z are interested in careers as social media influencers probably because they see that the vast majority of jobs under the current system are bullshit jobs. Gen Z probably feels and knows that it something really wrong with the way we organize our economy. If they think like that, they are right.

#7 When capitalists confuse the notion of personal freedom with social agency

Freedom is not like water that serves as a solution for thirst in all situations. Freedom is also not like the color black in clothing that goes well with any other color, if we listen to fashion experts.  

Personal freedom is something that an individual should have, according to constitutions and human rights charters.  I happen to be in the camp that believes, based on evidence, and interpretation of evidence, that there is no free will of the individual. We do not have the ability, the option, the biology to refuse the chains of causes in our brain. The entirety of our brain constitutes the self. The brain does the thinking and the choosing. There is no tiny voice, a mini human, that sits in our brain to push buttons and pull levers like in the movie Inside Out. The brain is all there is. I might as well say, my brain is reading video essay to you, and is causing my mouth to speak it.

When we place humans in interaction with other humans, we get something different. We get networks, relations, dependencies, hierarchies, rules, traditions. This is how society emerges from a number of many humans interacting, telling each other what to do, obeying or disobeying orders, passing judgments at each other. Having the ability to participate in society is called social agency.

Capitalists think personal freedoms and social agency are the same thing. They are not. Our social agency can be severely limited by inequalities, by social class, by law, by discrimination. Personal freedom if it’s understood as an expression of free will, does not really exist. What does exist is the innate human potential to thrive, which is something that we are born with, something we also cannot control.

What we can control is to increase social agency for all humans. Create conditions for everyone to fully explore their innate potential, allow everyone to ride on the waves of history, explore surprise and learning.

#8 When socialists forget about energy and physics

I have seen socialists, and lefties in general, that advocate for a green new deal or even climate Leninism. A green new deal is like the New Deal enacted by president Roosevelt in 1930s, after the Great Depression. This time around we put green in front of it. The European Green Deal wants: (1) no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, (2) economic growth decoupled from resource use, and (3) no person and no place left behind.

There is already evidence that economic growth cannot be disconnected from resource use. No matter what kind of economy we want to have, we cannot do it without resources. Some countries are decreasing emissions but it is not happening fast enough so we can have no net emissions by 2050. The 2024 World Energy Outlook writes that continued increase in gas demand cannot be ruled out. As a friendly reminder, natural gas is a fossil fuel and emits greenhouse gases.

We are also limited by the industrial capacity. A record high level of clean energy came online in 2023 but two thirds of the overall increase was still met by fossil fuels.

Even if we introduced a livable basic income for everyone on Earth it would not solve the problem if we keep the insane wealth inequalities. Lefties must consider policies that put hard maximum limits on wealth, energy consumption, and materials consumption on the super rich, and gradually demand the reduction in production as well, if we really want to become a sustainable society in 20 years.

#9 When environmentalists forget about power dynamics

I have seen environmentalists (and degrowthers!) advocating for reforestation, preservation of ecosystems, the replacement of industrial agriculture with permaculture, the adoption of a minimalist lifestyle. These ideas are great, they give a rush of dopamine, often called the happy hormone. They give us a sense of purpose and accomplishment. They make us feel we are good people.

This picture is missing a frame. Which is about power. In the 3-Fold model of capitalism we saw how power is one of the core elements of our economic system. We cannot ignore it. As much as we would like to live in an ecovillage or in a sustainable city, that could never happen if the power structures in society do not change fundamentally. If I am to make a real prophecy, I would say that we will not meet our environmental goals if we do not reform power under capitalism. A full transition to economic democracy is as important as rationing our production, consumption, energy demand, and extraction of natural resources.

Economic democracy is nothing less than (1) the phasing out of the one share = one vote principle that is the backbone of ownership of corporations, (2) the phasing out of unelected hierarchies in the economy, and (3) the phasing out of dispossession with consent and without consent, of personal and public property for the purpose of capital accumulation.

#10 Must talk about fundamentals, must talk policy

In the end, prophecies do not really matter. We all want to know the future. Contrary to what sci-fi keeps telling us, there is no time travel into the future faster than one day per day. If we want to have a clear direction of where we are heading as a society, we have no choice but to discuss the fundamental principles and values that make up our present.

In my 3-Fold model of capitalism I identified 3 doctrines that bind together our economy: proportionality, dispossession, and hierarchies. We could talk about: why are corporations organized on the principle of one share = one vote? Why do take resources from nature, use them to produce stuff, with no consideration for environmental degradation? Why do we think that we need hierarchies in business to make them more efficient?

This is a way of talking about fundamentals. There will be no future without seriously revisiting and updating our principles on which we build our society. Instead of using labels to address these questions, while we are aware of the dozens of mental biases that we carry in our brains, we can focus on discuss the qualities of our rules. We can talk about putting limits on wealth, increasing access to quality healthcare for everyone, or ending the brutal system of neocolonialism.