Covid – like every crisis – is grotesquely unfair.

The richer are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer.

My heart really goes out to people who have lost their livelihoods through this crisis.

Because I know there’s no justice in the world. Economics is a b!tch.

We’re seeing it already. Covid is hitting poorer people hardest.

In Australia, the Melbourne Institute Survey is showing that 24% of respondents said they are feeling moderately or very financially stressed, up from 21% in the previous month.

Melbourne Institute lead researcher Professor Guay Lim said unemployment was the clear driver behind the change.

“Closer analysis of the employed and unemployed within the survey data revealed that the proportion of unemployed who reported they were financially stressed increased from 18 per cent to 25 per cent, while the proportion of employed reporting being financially comfortable increased from 43 per cent to 47 per cent,” Professor Lim said.

Work from the Grattan Institute also shows that almost half of all working households had less than five weeks income at the bank, and one quarter – a full 25% of the population – have less than a weeks’ income:

That’s terrifying.

A lot of these people are going to be totally reliant on either JobSeeker or JobKeeper – both of which are set to be wound up in September.

And sadly, this is looking like a global phenomenon.

In America, a recent Fed survey found that almost 40 percent of American households making less than $40,000 lost a job in March.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said “the reversal of economic fortune” brought on by the coronavirus pandemic over the last two months in the United States “has caused a level of pain that is hard to capture in words.”

Statistics, though, can help paint a clearer picture of the crisis. In the same address, Powell said the Fed is releasing a survey Thursday which found that among people who were working in February, nearly 40 percent of those in households making less than $40,000 per year lost a job in March.

All told, Powell said, “the scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent, significantly worse than any recession since World War II.”

That’s the bottom, poorest section of the job-market, totally obliterated.

Over in the UK, the picture’s no better, where a third of Britain’s lowest-paid workers have lost their jobs.

The Resolution Foundation said 30% of those in the lowest income bracket had been affected by the damage caused to the labour market by the pandemic, compared with only 10% of those in the top fifth of earners.

The thinktank said that across the whole workforce, around 18% per cent of workers had lost work or been furloughed, including 25% of private sector workers. However, only 3% of those in the top income group had lost their jobs, with a further 6% being furloughed.

And this is always the way in times of crisis.

If you were struggling to get by, you get hammered.

If you’re were killing it already, then you get to write posts on social media about how nice it is to have time at home with the kids, with nothing to do.

And while the poor are getting slaughtered, the richest of the rich are making out like bandits.

We know that money-printing juices asset prices. We know that it boosts land and property values.

But no one cares.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Time to turn these tables, don’t you think?

JG.

Our last set of Conspiracy Filters – saving the best for last

Okay, I’ve got my last batch of conspiracy filters for you. And I’ve saved the most fun for last.

Remember, these filters aren’t about helping you determine the ‘truth’. They’re about helping you decide what conspiracies are worth worrying about, and which ones aren’t.

Ready? Let’s start with the De Niro Filter

The De Niro Filter

Does the theory involve the implausible use of celebrities?

A ridiculous number of theories out there seem to involve Hollywood actors in deep-state activities. As if they’ve gone, “I’ve just made a gazillion dollars prancing about like a twit, I think I’ll go get involved in establishing a one world government. I’m sure my unique skills are going to be really useful to the cause.”

I could have named this after any number of celebrities – Justin Beiber, Lady Gaga, Eminem. But I went with Robert de Niro, after his supposed role in the assignation of a Pakistani female education activist. From Wikipedia:

Conspiracy theories concerning Malala Yousafzai… variously allege that she is a Western spy, or that her attempted murder by the Taliban in 2012 was a secret operation to further discredit the Taliban, and was organized by her father and the CIA and carried out by actor Robert de Niro disguised as an Uzbek homeopath.

Lol. Homeopath. Oh gawd. I’m crying.

I think the people who imagine that celebrities are doing this stuff believe they live in a universe filled with no more than 1000 people, and that reality is much like what they see on their screens.

Celebrities sell – it has gossip value. But for me, it never passes the laugh test.

Next.

The Pure Evil Filter

Does the theory ask me to believe that the perpetrators are motivated by nothing but “pure evil”?

A lot of conspiracy theories seem to suggest that the people behind them are simply Disney-style evil. They want to do evil things because they “just like evil”.

I think this is actually just a retreat opinion when you can’t understand, or can’t be bothered trying to understand, someone’s motivations.

Evil isn’t a motivation, it’s a calculation. It’s about what you are willing to do to get what you want.

Hitler wasn’t motivated by evil. It was his willingness to do horrific things to get what he wanted – that’s what makes him the poster-boy of evil.

Now, quite a few people have said that Bill Gates is behind the Corona virus outbreak. The theory goes that he has deliberately released the virus to drive acceptance of mandatory vaccines. He is pushing mandatory vaccines because… he is evil.

I’m not buying it. I could maybe be open to the idea that Bill Gates is a technician who is overly focused on technical solutions to health problems, and the agencies he has sponsored have been too caviller with their testing programs in the third world.

That might be plausible.

But he’s definitely not motivated by the money – a man with his brand and leverage in the tech world would have a gazillion ways to make money that didn’t involve the brand risk of murdering African children.

And so you’ve got to go to “Bill Gates is evil” because it’s the only motivation that makes sense.

But as I said, evil isn’t a motivation, it’s a calculation.

And it just doesn’t add up for me.

Next.

The Delusions of Relevance Filter

Is the plot aimed at silencing or neutralising a group of people who were never going to do anything about anything anyway?

One thing I’ve noticed is that many people who believe in conspiracy theories imagine themselves to be quite close to the action.

The Reptilians are using chem-trail mind control because they are afraid of what me and my friends are capable of.

The Corona lockdown is about silencing and controlling us because the government is scared of our power.

It is possible that the most powerful organisations in the world think that some hippy in a café posing stuff on the internet is a threat to their interests, but I doubt it.

In the same way that I doubt anyone is really worried about the revolutionary potential of the Australian population – most of whom take absolutely no interest in politics on day to day basis.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t attempts by the powers that be to manipulate opinion or ‘manufacture consent. Sure. Totally.

But when someone says that the main aim of the plot is about silencing or neutralising them, it feels a bit like a delusion of grandeur – the imagined belief that you actually have any role to play in this story.

… particularly when you have no demonstrated capacity to play any role in the story other than posting a few angry memes on Facebook.

So when a theory says that there’s a plot to control a group of people, the first question I ask is how much did that group need to be controlled anyway? Like, at all?

This is the Delusions of Relevance filter.

And that’s a wrap.

Hopefully you’ve found this useful. Some people are saying that it is helping them name why certain theories just ‘feel off’.

If so, I’m glad.

Anyway, just to recap, our complete list, brought to you by the Freemason Space Lizard Corporation, is:

1. The Comfortably Numb Filter – does the theory leave me feeling righteous but disempowered and helpless?
2. The Truman Filter – does the theory involve an implausible number of people coordinated with clock-work precision?
3. The Magical Lizard Filter – does the theory ask me to believe in magical lizards, supernatural phenomena, or implausible tech?
4. The Contorted Competency Filter – Does the theory ask me to believe in competency where no competency has been demonstrated, or in incompetency where no incompetency has been demonstrated?
5. The Inverted Paydays Filter – do the payouts run counter to the perpetrators interests?
6. The Decoy Filter – does the theory ask me to look past an obvious conspiracy to a deeper counter-theory?
7. The Pure Evil Filter – does the theory ask me to believe that the perpetrators are motivated by pure evil?
8. The De Niro Filter – does the theory involve the implausible use of celebrities? Is it Unbelieberble?
9. The Delusions of Relevance Filter – is the theory aimed at silencing or neutralising a group of people who were never going to do anything about anything anyway?

Happy thinking folks.

JG.

Scomo aiming for world domination? I'm not so sure.

So the Australia government released its tracking app this week.

(Note to the PR apartment – you’ve got to control the message more here. You really don’t want ‘government’, ‘tracking’ and ‘app’ appearing in the same sentence.)

I’m genuinely curious to see how it goes down. I’m going to do a little more research and write something up for Friday.

But I’m already hearing people say that this is all proof-positive that the Corona virus was engineered to bring the whole world under a one-government police state, right? I mean. The proof’s right there. Open your eyes, sheeple!

I’ve genuinely heard people making this argument. (Yep, you guessed it. I’m not buying it.)

And I think there are actually two important things to separate out here.

So while I’m fully open to the idea that some governments and players around the world are going to use this crisis as an opportunity to ram or sneak through some dodgy things, it’s another step again to believe that those actors actually engineered the crisis.

Particularly if it involves implausible levels of control (The Truman Filter) or implausible levels of beyond-human abilities (The Magical Lizard Filter).

You don’t want to mistake opportunism for intent.

I think it’s actually important to keep some social-distance between these two ideas. I mean, it’s always worth keeping your guard up with people in power.

Always.

Scomo and the government are going to have to do some pretty radical stuff here. That’s what the crisis demands. But the price of freedom is vigilance. We need to watch the situation carefully.

But if we start going down the rabbit hole of thinking that Scomo et al are part of some global conspiracy to orchestrate something like this, then you then have to start pulling in some weird ideas to keep that story consistent.

Like competency.

I reckon you’re always on dangerous ground assuming competency when no competency has been demonstrated.

Can you imagine how competent you’d have to be to pull a swifty like this? I’m not seeing those levels of competency in Canberra.

(No offence.)

And so this is our conspiracy filter for today. I call it The Contorted Competency Filter.

The Contorted Competency Filter

Does the theory ask me to believe in competency where no competency has been demonstrated, or in incompetency where no incompetency has been demonstrated?

As you can see, it cuts both ways.

You’re on dangerous ground assuming incompetence where competence has been amply demonstrated.

Like science. Science has done a crap-tonne for humanity in past 500 years or so. Science has, with enough time and enough trial and error, gotten results, again and again.

I wouldn’t take the other side of that bet.

Now, it is possible that virologists have completely misunderstood the nature of viruses for decades now, and there is, in fact, no such thing as a virus, as some people are arguing. It’s also possible that the tens of thousands of academics studying climate change are suffering from some sort of mass delusion.

It’s possible.

But it’s incredibly unlikely.

Science works on the law of large numbers. If you get enough people looking at a topic for long enough, bias and incompetence gets filtered out and you get something close to the truth.

(It’s the same story with jelly-bean counting competitions. If you get enough people to guess how many beans are in the jar, the average guess ends up being quite accurate.)

But to build a theory on an assumption that scientists are all wrong is, to my way of thinking, building a theory on incompetence where no incompetence has been demonstrated.

Not collectively. Not over time.

So that’s what the Contorted Competency Filter is about. We need to ask ourselves, do the agents behind this conspiracy have the competence to do this? Are the safeguards against this theory incompetent and weak enough to let it happen?

You’d be surprised how much noise this filter filters out.

JG.

So many conspiracy theories out there right now. Here’s the first filter I use.

Okay, let’s start working our way through the conspiracy theories that are out there right now.

We’re a couple of posts into this now.

In the first post I showed you how our biology makes the pursuit of perfect truth incredibly difficult. In the second post I made the point that there’s so much information out there nowadays, that you need to be using filters to sort the plausible from the implausible.

There’s just too much out there to crunch all that data yourself.

In that post I gave you a list of my filters. So let’s talk about the first one.

I call this The Comfortably Numb Filter.

Now, this is probably the most subtle filter, but I would say it’s also the most important.

Because the truth is a lot of conspiracy theories are completely disempowering – they suck the life out of you and freeze you up.

And the only thing that they offer you in return is a feeling of smug righteousness.

(A devil’s bargain if ever there was one.)

This is something I noticed a lot in the early days of investing – when I was starting out, and hadn’t learnt to be selective in who I listened to and who I didn’t.

And in those days, I can guarantee you that for every idea I had, I could find someone who was going to tell me it was a disaster waiting to happen.

“Oh you want to get into stocks? Don’t you know that there’s a massive cover-up of just how much debt is on corporate balance sheets. All the accounting firms are in on it. The whole market is about to explode.”

“Oh, you want to trade commodities? Don’t you know that the Rothschilds have the silver and gold markets stitched up, and will destroy those markets if any government steps out of line?”

“Oh, you want to trade property? Don’t you know that the banks are artificially juicing valuations to boost profits? Any day now, they’re going to sell out and the market will come tumbling down.”

For ten, maybe 15 years I listened to stuff like this.

But then, I noticed that even after ten years, that crash was always “any day now”.

And I noticed that the people who clung to these theories weren’t using them to invest. They weren’t short-selling these markets.

They were just using them as an excuse to do nothing.

And what I could see, when I watched that part of myself that wanted to believe them, is that I wanted that excuse to do nothing.

Doing something was hard. It required education, research and work. It required taking risks.

Doing nothing was easy.

And so if there was a story that justified doing nothing, it was very tempting to believe it.

Nowadays, I’m on to it.

I recognise the bias that I have – that everyone has.

And I am highly suspicious of conspiracy theories that justify inaction.

“No point engaging in politics. It’s all controlled by space lizards anyway.”

“I could recycle more, but global warming is a con perpetrated by Big Green anyway.”

“I’m not changing my behaviour. The Corona Virus isn’t a real thing anyway.”

For a theory to have any value, it needs to guide action.

But it’s also worth watching for the ‘viral’ nature of certain theories.

Like these ones. If they just left you feeling overwhelmed and helpless, no one would buy it. They also needs to make you feel smug and righteous. That’s the pay-off. That you know more than other people. That you know the truth. That you’re too smart for the trap that’s waiting for them.

That’s why these theories are popular. They justify inaction, and make you feel righteous.

That’s a toxic drug.

So this probably isn’t as hard and as fast as the other filters, but it’s still the most important.

Beware theories that make you feel smug in doing diddly-squat.

JG.