

How to read the news to predict the course of nations - andrewwhalen
http://delvenews.com/wonklens/steve-levine/

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ChuckMcM
Wow, this is just really really great. I am biased because I do this too, read
all sorts of stuff, put articles together, make silly predictions to myself
about how that will affect the world and then watch to see if I was close.

When you do this for a while it becomes habituated. And then you start seeing
not the data points, but the connections. Stories that seem to cluster around
certain events, or predict them. Some really obvious ones like in California
when ever there is a call to 'cut spending' in the legislature, just like
clockwork there will be 6 to 12 stories appearing about how important it is to
keep teachers well paid and how they have already sacrificed so much. These
sorts of 'dots' become predictive of future events, and knowing the future can
tell you other things (like other people who are doing the same thing you are)

I explained it to a guy on the train once, if you ride a train from point A to
point B, it is full of strangers. If you ride it every day for 6 months from
point A to point B (and you are at all observant) you notice "That person
works in Palo Alto and lives in Mtn View, that person only sits facing
opposite the rest of the car, those two people are in a relationship but
trying not to be obvious about it, that guy hates his job or wants a new job"
etc. Because each day you right gives you a 'dot' and after a while some of
those dots coalesce into meaning.

~~~
bane
Something else to watch for, whenever there's a really important piece of
negative news about the government, there's almost always a piece of really
trivial news about the entertainment industry or about a dramatic, but
commonplace natural phenomenon (that's usually not reported at all) or a
tragic death of an otherwise unremarkable, but photogenic young person, that
will get far more news coverage and push the important bit off the front page.

I've found Western media is fairly subtle at it, but in some countries the
media monopoly is such that it's done almost so ham-handedly as to be almost
absurd. There's a few in the U.S. that are pretty clumsy about it too.

It's literally watching the shitty supermarket tabloids jump up from next to
the candy bars to the number one national news story.

What's even more interesting is that the media, in a sort of faux meta-
analysis, will acknowledge ways that stories are buried or minimized, that
have nothing to do with the ways they actually bury and minimize important
news -- the Friday bombshell press conference for example.

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onassar
I really loved the piece it linked to: [http://qz.com/17335/ten-indicators-
you-should-watch-to-predi...](http://qz.com/17335/ten-indicators-you-should-
watch-to-predict-the-geopolitics-of-energy/)

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stfu
Isn't that just basic market analysis? All he does is applying Porter's good
old five forces (Competition, Substitutes, Buyer Power, Supply (Chain),
Rivalry) and modifying it to the Oil market.

I don't really see there the "new" component, but thankfully he clarifies that
is intention is not to be predictive. When talking about Geo Politics I just
can not resist recommending "Essence Of Decision"[1], in my opinion one of the
most excellent books on that subject.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essence_of_Decision> "the founding study of
the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and in doing so revolutionized the
field of international relations"

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205guy
Paging Hari Seldon...

~~~
cmrx64
It'd be fascinating to see psychohistory come to be, and at smaller scales
than the dozens of billions Asimov used.

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ralphc
Anyone know a quick way to add who someone is following to a twitter account?
I'd love to set one up and follow who he's following.

~~~
andrewwhalen
Hi Ralph - I interviewed Steve and submitted the post. One easy way to read
what Steve is reading is to sign up for our social news reader at
www.delvenews.com We built a news feed based on what Steve reads called "Wonk
Lens: Steve Levine." If you sign up, you'll be able to follow it from the
"Edit My Channels" page. Cheers!

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nirvana
This is good stuff and he covers a lot of important indicators.

One thing I discovered in 2001, and validated from 2002-2007 is that monetary
policy is a massive indicator of the direction of countries. Once you
understand economics (Economics in one lesson by henry hazlitt is a very
readable place to start, but Austrian business cycle theory is the real deal)
you can see how things are going to go pretty clearly. Which is why in 2001
when the mises institute was predicting a housing bubble (long before even
Krugman advocated creating a housing bubble) ABCT let me know that it would
eventually pop. I put this theory into practice with a variety of financial
instruments and profited from it.

The thing about real science is it lets you make predictions. Oil is very
critical and this guy is onto some really good stuff... but economics in a
broader sense and monetary theory in specific, is also hugely relevant.

The biggest tragedy of this kind of knowledge, though, is watching people make
bad decisions (like buying houses they couldn't afford) based on nonsense they
were told (essentially propaganda). Even someone who knows you a long time and
thinks your a genius will believe CNN, politicians and their own desire to buy
a house and "get in on the action" over wise counsel.

Which ultimately left me with this conclusion: People get the world they
create, and they are complicit in its creation. How many people who hate the
PATRIOT ACT and NDAA voted for Obama? How many should have known? How many
people who wanted prudent financial management voted for Bush? How many should
have known they would get deficit spending? How many were tricked into voting
for one of these guys with the idea that the alternative was so much
worse...when in retrospect they aren't that bad (Bush, for instance, never
cracked down on abortion like we were told to fear in 2000, and he was in
office 8 years.)

What if everybody actually demanded their government was honest, prudent, and
abided by the constitution?

So, yes, use everything you can to understand geopolitics, because we're in a
time of great upheaval- or close to it. The future for the USA is dimmer than
the past, unfortunately, no matter which major party wins the next several
elections.

~~~
youngerdryas
>The future for the USA is dimmer than the past, unfortunately, no matter
which major party wins the next several elections.

Hardly. I fail to see how the domestic oil boom is a liability,
technologically superior energy sources will win in the long run more quickly
with a stable economy in the west. Which political party wins is practically
irrelevant in the long term as today's liberal morphs into tomorrow's
conservative in an unstoppable march of progress.

