My crystal ball be cloudy, dawg.

I respect expertise. I have assembled a large and diverse set of people whose opinions I trust and whose insights I value. And over the past year or so I have seen the overwhelming majority of their voices either (a) change the subject (b) spout off-topic nonsense or (c) drive hard into partisan willfulness.

On the one hand, it's been useful because I've been able to prune a lot of my reading. if I follow you for business insights and you veer into the efficacy of facemasks? GREAT. You have just demonstrated that you have no fucking clue what the economy is doing which means I never should have paid attention to you in the first place. On the other hand, it's been dreadful because you recognize just how much of human behavior is starlings murmurating. "We're going left" is a lot less useful than "we're going to go right" and the number of people capable of predicting the swerve is a whole lot lower than I anticipated.

I think the worldview of the intelligentsia would have been a lot more impacted by Enron and Worldcom eating shit if the Twin Towers hadn't come down shortly thereafter. Oddly enough, the financial guys are still fixated on Bear Stearns while the rest of the world still can't quite grasp why Occupy Wall Street didn't accomplish anything. None of it matters until it matters.