Egg Prices At All Time High, Trumpanzees Revolt!

Well, they should, given how many of them blamed Biden for sky-high grocery prices, particularly eggs. And given how fervently they embraced His Imperial Majesty Trump the First’s promise to bring down grocery prices on Day 1.

As always, let’s start with the data.

As you can see, the average price of a dozen grade A eggs in US cities is now higher than it ever was under Biden’s administration (this data is from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; you can dive into the details here).

The embrace of Trump’s idiotic promise — we’ll get to why it was idiotic in the first place shortly — and the handwaving acceptance of it by his cult followers is a perfect example of non-critical thinking, aka stupidity. It starts with having an understandably strong negative emotional reaction to some change, in this case the cost of a mainstay of your diet rising rapidly and dramatically¹.

But where things go off the rails happens next.

The fight or flight type response is “this is wrong, somebody screwed up, they need to be held accountable, and something needs to be done about it ASAP”. There’s nothing wrong with fight or flight responses — they evolved² because in certain common situations survival may well depend on a rapid response.

But — news flash! — one of the primary purposes of civilization is to reduce or eliminate the need for rapid responses. In other words, civilization affords us the benefit, at least at times, of being able to think and reflect before we act. Experience shows this can increase the power and value of our response enormously.

But we have to choose to take the time to reflect and consider how we’re going to react.

It’s not a given we’ll do that, particularly when we have instincts not to³. The trick, as my mom used to say, is to use your head as something other than a hat rack.

Trump’s promise was idiotic because it ignored the reality of why egg prices were climbing: a virulent strain of avian flu. For which there is no cure. Which, by the way, highlights the idiocy of his follow-on statements about how it was all Biden’s fault for killing off infected chickens. With no cure, those chickens were going to die anyway. The real choice — as opposed to the stupidly delusional fake choice fermenting in what passes for Trump’s brain — was whether or not we were going to let them infect their fellow egg-layers — and lose even more chickens — before they passed.

He could’ve learned all this at any time. But since he’s a very stable genius — who apparently knows more about anything he’s interested in than anyone else — he saw no need to do that. Which inevitably led him to make stupid promises.

Trump himself may be, probably is, incapable of thinking critically. But the intriguing thing about the politics here is how did so many people come to accept and embrace his stupidity? I may condemn the similar stupidity of Trumpanzees, but not all of his supporters are Trumpanzees, and statistically some portion of those supporters must have gone through the reflect before reacting process, and as a result saw through the nonsense.

It’s an example of a peculiar failure of human cognition driven by, of all things, our inherent optimism. Yes, optimism.

While we are, as a species, risk-averse, we also tend to be gamblers. Everyone else is making money off an investment that sounds sketchy? Well, as long as I can grab my piece of the pie and get out before it collapses, I’m in!

Hello, bubble! It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself time and time again throughout history, involving things ranging from Dutch tulip bulbs to the invention of radio to wiring the world via the internet.

So, given a choice between someone who says “egg prices are rising because of an incurable illness, we’re just going to have to weather the storm together” and someone who says “they’ve failed to do their job to let you keep enjoying your omelets, vote for me and I’ll solve the problem immediately and then punish those dumbasses!”, guess what? Many of us will choose door number two. Even if we know, or suspect, that door number one is based on a more accurate reading of the world.

And just like all economic bubbles, when they inevitably burst, cause enormous pain and disruption, so do political bubbles, too. Let’s just hope most of the pain falls on Trump’s supporters.

1. the rapidity is important because it acts to make the change punch through all the other changes we deal with from day to day ↩

2. If you don’t accept evolution I feel sorry for you, not the least because you have to explain and accept why a loving deity would want to screw over your household budget. ↩

3. We all also have instincts to urinate and defecate when we must, and we mostly generally do a pretty good job of managing those instincts, so overriding or managing your instinctive responses clearly isn’t impossible. ↩