Nobody Manages the Economy

On the responsibility of citizens to be informed about their world.

Photo by Dominik Lückmann on Unsplash

“I voted for Trump because he’s better at the economy. I liked how the economy was in 2019, and despite the fact I have no actual theory for how Trump being president will recreate the economy of 2019, because I have no actual idea what relationship Trump’s actions had to the economy of 2019, the fact that he was president at a time I remembered the economy being better makes me feel that making him president again will somehow bring about these economic conditions that I miss.”

— Many American Voters in 2024

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I want to say something that is not a political argument. It is not a defense of any party’s economic record. It is not neoliberal propaganda against wealth redistribution — I support programs of economic justice and I will not be misread as arguing against them. It is a statement about the nature of reality that is, in the most literal sense, beyond reasonable dispute.

Nobody manages the economy.

Not Donald Trump. Not Joe Biden. Not the Federal Reserve, not the Council of Economic Advisers, not the most sophisticated macroeconomic modeling team ever assembled. The economy is not a machine with a control panel. It is not a system that responds predictably to policy inputs. It is a massively decentralized, adaptive, reflexive organism — the aggregate of hundreds of millions of individual decisions made simultaneously, in response to conditions that are themselves the product of previous decisions, none of which any single actor controls or can fully observe.

While many — especially old-school socialists, though most modern democratic socialist theorists have largely conceded the point — will insist this is a political opinion, I will spend the rest of this essay impressing upon you that it is not.

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Let me be precise about the measurement problem, because it is not an economic argument. It is a fact of nature that appears at every scale of inquiry.

In the quantum realm, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle establishes that the act of measuring a particle’s position disturbs its momentum, and vice versa. You cannot measure both simultaneously with arbitrary precision. The measurement and the measured are not separable. The observer is inside the system.

In polling, selection effects mean that the act of asking a question changes the answer. People report what they think the questioner wants to hear, what is socially acceptable, what places them favorably in the interaction. The survey is not a transparent window onto opinion. It is an intervention that partially constitutes the opinion it claims to measure.

In economics, the problem is even more fundamental. A model sufficiently detailed to predict the behavior of a complex economy would need to contain more information than the economy itself contains — which is physically impossible. And any model that influences the behavior of the actors within the economy changes the economy it was built to describe. The prediction invalidates itself. The map consumes the territory.

This is not a limitation of our current tools. It is not a problem that better data will solve. It is a structural feature of what it means to be an observer embedded within the system you are trying to model. Gödel proved that even formal systems of sufficient complexity contain truths they cannot prove from within. The economy is not a formal system — it is something far messier, with no axioms and no derivation rules — but the lesson generalizes: the model that fully apprehends a system of this complexity from inside it cannot exist. The prediction invalidates itself. The map consumes the territory.

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When someone says “I liked how President X managed the economy,” they have committed, in eight words, a dramatic misapprehension of reality.

Not a forgivable rounding error. Not a slight oversimplification for conversational convenience. A categorical error about the nature of the relationship between political leadership and economic outcomes — one that makes the speaker easy to manipulate, because anyone who claims the ability to manage the economy is making a promise that is physically impossible to keep, and the promise sounds most credible to people who believe the management is possible.

The economy of 2019 was not the product of Donald Trump’s management. It was the product of a vast, largely invisible accumulation of decisions, policies, trends, demographic shifts, technological developments, and global conditions that had been accumulating for decades before Trump took office — and for decades before Obama, and Clinton, and Bush. The president who occupied the White House during a period of economic growth is not the author of that growth any more than the shaman who performed the rain dance is the author of the rain that followed it. The correlation is real. The causal inference is not.

This is not to say presidents have no effect on economic conditions. Policy matters. Tax structure matters. Trade relationships matter. Regulatory environments matter. But the relationship between any specific presidential action and any specific economic outcome is so mediated by complexity, time lag, global feedback, and competing causes that the confident attribution — “he was better at the economy” — is not a political judgment. It is a failure of epistemology.

There is an important asymmetry here that deserves its own statement. Presidents cannot manage the economy upward — they cannot steer a complex adaptive system toward desired outcomes through the application of will and policy, because the system is too large, too reflexive, and too resistant to top-down optimization for that kind of control to be possible. But they can damage it. A tariff is a shock. A fiscal deficit crisis is a shock. Threatening trading partners is a shock. Regulatory uncertainty that freezes investment is a shock. Complex systems that tend toward equilibrium when left alone tend toward disruption when subjected to sudden, sustained external shocks. Donald Trump has subjected the American economy to precisely these shocks, and the consequences are real and measurable and his. The claim that he is good at managing the economy is the rain dance error. The claim that his actions have damaged it is not. The asymmetry matters: presidents are much better at breaking things than building them, and the voter who cannot distinguish between these two very different kinds of presidential economic agency is a voter who can be sold almost anything.

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Here is where I want to deliver what I will unapologetically call a moral sermon, and I want to do it without condescension, because the failure I am describing is not the voter’s alone.

Democratic self-governance is not just a right. It is a practice. And like all practices, it requires something of you. It requires you to develop, over the course of a lifetime, a working model of how the world actually functions — one that is honest about what governance can and cannot do, about what presidents can and cannot control, about the difference between correlation and causation, about the limits of your own ability to observe complex systems from inside them.

This is not a demand for expertise. You do not need a PhD in economics to be a responsible democratic citizen. Most of the basic moral lessons of human life are things a five-year-old can grasp. The basic epistemic lessons are not much harder. You already know, intuitively, that the rooster does not cause the sunrise. You already know that when something goes well while a particular person is in charge, that person did not necessarily cause the good thing. You apply this reasoning every day in your private life.

The demand is simply that you apply it here too. To the domain where it matters most. To the decision that aggregates with hundreds of millions of other decisions to determine the conditions under which everyone lives.

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The failure is not the voter’s alone because we have not built the civic culture that treats this as a requirement of citizenship.

We teach civics as a description of institutions — the three branches, the electoral college, the Bill of Rights. We do not teach it as an epistemological practice. We do not teach the question: how do you know what you know? How do you distinguish genuine causal relationships from temporal coincidence? How do you evaluate a claim about a complex system when you are embedded inside that system and cannot observe it from outside? How do you hold your own intuitions and lived experiences as data without mistaking them for the whole picture?

These are not graduate seminar questions. They are the prerequisites for self-governance. They are what you need to know not to be manipulated by a man who says he will bring back the economy of 2019 — a promise that is not just unlikely to be kept, but is incoherent on its face, because the economy of 2019 was not his to give and is not his to recreate.

The voter who cast their ballot on that basis is not stupid. They are responding rationally to their lived experience — the felt memory of conditions that were better, the intuitive attribution of those conditions to the figure who presided over them — with the tools they were given. And the tools they were given were insufficient for the task they were being asked to perform.

That is our failure. The collective failure of a society that takes democratic citizenship seriously as a right and not seriously enough as a responsibility — a responsibility that runs in both directions: the citizen’s obligation to reason carefully, and the society’s obligation to equip them to do so.

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I started Notes from the Circus to discuss philosophy in public. It is my happy place. The Crisis Dispatch series will continue — the world is not yet done burning and I am not yet done documenting it. But I want to write, sometimes, about the things I actually love. About the measurement problem and Gödel and the nature of complex systems and what it means to try to know anything at all from inside the thing you are trying to know.

This is one of those pieces. It happens to have political implications. Most true things do.

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