Have a Positive 2024!

In 2012, our economic model predicted a global stagflation starting in 2019 sparking the Crisis Years.

The 1970’s stagflation was caused by the Israel-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973. So we assumed that the 2020’s stagflation would be caused by an Iran-Saudi war which would then cut oil from the Strait of Hormuz. This seemed to come true when Trump assassinated Soleimani on January 3, 2020, guaranteeing some military retaliation by Iran.

At that point, everything seemed solved – events in Nature could be predicted. The successful prediction meant that the core principles behind the model could be applied to predict everything else.

Unfortunately, Nature suddenly throws a wrench at the prediction by bringing in Covid19 – something that had no precedent and therefore could not be modeled.

The virus steals the headlines and even pours water at Iran by letting Covid thrive there. This caused stagnation by locking people down globally.

Then the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022 which caused inflation globally.

It proves that no matter how hard you try to pin Nature down with exact predictions, Nature always does the unexpected.

It shows that Nature can only be generally predicted, but not specifically. The stagflation did arrive in the 2020’s, but in the way that no one could accurately predict.

Instead of oil being blocked by Iran, causing inflation, it was goods being blocked by Yemen, and wheat and gas being blocked by Russia.

But all of this exposes aspects of Nature. It proves that it is better to have general goals than specific ones. The more specific your goal, the greater the risk of disappointment, and Nature throwing a wrench at those goals.

It would be better to keep the goals as large, general, flexible, and open-ended as possible, instead of making them sharp, precise, and split into many specific rigid subgoals.

Most importantly, positive thinking is essential.

Normally, knowing that a long crisis is coming would make one a pessimist. But a positive thinker would take the crisis as an opportunity that exposes the wrong policies and systems that are in place, so that these can be fixed. Such fixes would then lead to Post-Crisis years that are so much better than those before 2020.

So instead of greeting a Happy New Year, knowing that the suffering in Gaza and Ukraine will continue in 2024 and beyond, it would be better to wish everyone a “Positive” New Year so that what is causing the suffering will be fixed and changed.