Since 2016, a bizarre sequence of events has challenged our belief in political rationality. First, populism (chiefly, the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump), then the pandemic and now Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have uncovered previously concealed strains of fallacious thinking. People keep acting apparently against their own self-interest, from Brexit voters making themselves poorer to antivaxxers risking death, to the Russian state destroying the wellbeing of its citizens.
Indeed, perhaps the emblematic politician of our time, Trump, displays an unmatched understanding of human irrationality, as if he’d absorbed the entire corpus of behavioural economics. Meanwhile, opponents of these movements, like me, keep failing to foresee their next illogical choices. Here I’ve tried to identify the biggest irrationalities on both sides.
