we'll know for sure in about 200 years
Something I heard recently in a podcast with Robert Greene that I liked:
I see so many stupid people out there who immediately react to something in the news and make their judgment—'this was great' or that was stupid.' I'm sorry, you have no idea. In two years we'll know if it was great or it was stupid, and in twenty years we'll have an even better idea, and in 200 years, we'll even know for certain.
The media coverage of politics is particularly guilty of this. That entire industry is captivated by the idea that they need to be "first." First to break the story, to get a comment on what's happened, to "define the narrative." Those takes and analysis end up looking wrong or just plain silly far more often than not.
My best understanding of why is the upside of being right loudly and early is net far greater than the downside of being wrong loudly and early.
With everyone participating in this competition, if you're right, you look like the person or group that really knows what's going on and you can ride that high a long ways. As for those who were wrong, well, the news cycle moves on and you're just one of the many who got it wrong. No big deal.
The biggest recent example is Trump's tariff plan.
The commentary is a bit bewildering. It's ranged from "this is the end of the dominant American economy, we are shooting ourselves in the foot" to "this is the beginning of a new era of American manufacturing, jobs will be coming back, Made in America is coming back, we're going to stop getting ripped off by other countries, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, maybe ever (say this in a Trump voice)."
I understand, with something as big as sweeping tariffs, nearly everything is affected, from the prices consumers pay to the financial markets. A lot of dough can be made if you're right about what's going to happen early enough. But no one knows. That's the point. So just watch and wait before labeling it a smashing success or an appalling failure.
This goes for pro-tariff people as well. On and after "Liberation Day," the tariff-doomers were the loudest, pointing to the drop in the markets and the rhetoric coming from other countries and business leaders. A few months later, the tariff-maxxers were loudest, pointing to new highs in the stock markets and the "really great deals" the administration was striking with various countries.
Now the economy might be starting to swing the other way—unemployment ticking up and tariff impacts are setting into consumer prices. We still don't know how it's all going to shake out.
Let's heed Robert Greene's advice.