Now that the Donald Trump IS, against all expectations, the Republican nominee for President, many people (including many Republicans) are wondering how it all came to this. One Ezra Klein of Vox says Donald Trump’s nomination scares him. He clearly isn’t alone. But as surprising and unexpected as the Donald Trump rise has been, people have been falling all over themselves to try and explain it. Many of the explanations have ranged from the dismissive (racism, loss of white male power) to the more thoughtful (stalled economy, feeling of being left behind).

So what has happened?

When something disruptive like a Donald Trump happens, it is usually an indication that something is wrong in society. It means that a significant fraction of a population has become alienated from whatever system we are talking about. Browbeating the population, as some center-left media outlets are currently attempting to do, won’t get anyone to change their mind. A more useful exercise is to examine why people feel alienated (in this case on the center-right).

Personally, I believe that there are several reasons.

1.)    Government doesn’t function well on a day to day basis.

While the left will talk about Ted Cruz and shutting down the government, I am talking about the fact that so many people experience the government (and government regulations) as useless B.S. that adds no value to their lives, wastes time, and hinders them from being productive. During the heyday of “Big Government” (1930 to 1970), people supported it (to the dismay of small government conservatives) because it visibly made life better than it had before. If you took someone through a time machine from 1930 to 1970, they would be amazed at how much better everything was. The schools were better, the roads were better, the cities functioned better, there was more electricity, etc. Government was bigger, and things obviously functioned better.

But today, government doesn’t function. It doesn’t secure the border as it is surely obligated to do. Education is a joke. Tax forms are byzantine, and the roads & infrastructure are falling apart. With the Democrats touting largely the same things that they have for 30 or 40 years, and the Republicans afraid to actually make significant changes, the stagnation has reached a point that people are willing to try anything that might have a chance of making things better.

2.)    Government is corrupt.

There is a feeling that people in government get special treatment. People are supposed to be equal under the law, but it has become increasingly apparent that this is not actually the case. People who break the rules, as long as they break the rules in a left-wing direction, suffer no serious consequences. Whether Lois Lerner using the IRS to target Tea Party groups (more on that later), or people falsifying records at the Veteran’s Administration and getting away with it, people feel that they are ending up on the short end of the stick and that the existing rules that would correct this injustice won’t be applied. The most significant example is the lack of an indictment for Hillary Clinton. The FBI director started out by say that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges in this case, and ended by saying that other people in similar situations would likely face charges. Translation: You little people would face charges, but Hillary Clinton to too important a person to be held accountable for her actions.

3.)    Government/Media Abuse Of The Center-Right.

Since Barack Obama was sworn in as President in 2009, the national media has treated opposition to his agenda as illegitimate. The media won’t stand up for the rights of conservatives/Republicans; the groups who would naturally oppose the agenda of a Democrat President. When the IRS abuses ordinary citizens trying to exercise their rights to participate, the media says nothing. When there is a mass shooting, the media tries to slander center-right groups of citizens by immediately implying that they might be responsible (and then are visibly disappointed when this turn out not to be the case). The media says nothing when the government effectively forces people to violate their consciences if they want a certain job. They say nothing when the government forces religious groups to violate their principles (such as paying for birth control). The media didn’t really come to the defense of Fox News when the Obama Administration tried to declare that it wasn’t a legitimate media organization, something a government has no right to do. Whether the right to free speech, the right to practice one’s religion (not just in church on Sunday, but also in one’s daily life), a free press, and the right to own a firearm: the government has been abusing these rights at various times, and the media is remarkably tolerant of these abuses. Consequently, the government AND the media have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the center-right.

4.)    Government Ignores The Feelings Of Large Swaths Of America.

The economy is stagnant. Manufacturing has been outsourced. The middle class is shrinking. Economic insecurity is growing. Illegal Immigrants are impacting social services and competing for blue collar jobs. And the government refuses to do anything. It cuts trade deals that disadvantage American workers. It tells Americans that wanting to reduce or eliminate illegal immigration makes them a bad person. It has actively opposed state governments (who are dealing with the fallout of illegal immigration) from taking actions on their own to enforce existing immigration law. This is not necessarily to say that America should have less immigration or that freer trade has been a net negative for America as a whole. But the fact is that these policies DO produce losers as well as winners. And the people who feel unsettled and disadvantaged by the economic shifts of the last 30 years are being ignored and not being addressed.

In short, these four factors, broadly speaking, have provided an opening for someone like a Donald Trump to run and actually become the nominee for President of a major political party. And given that his opponent is so unpopular too, he actually has a chance of winning. A government, and their media allies, can’t continuously abuse a certain (significant) segment of the population and expect to continue to have legitimacy in that population. A government can’t continue to ignore the needs of a significant fraction of its people and expect to maintain legitimacy. Someone, or some organization, will rise to stand up for that forgotten and ignored portion of the population. Donald Trump is a warning. Win or lose, something will have to change. Otherwise, the U.S. is in for a prolonged period of, dare I say it, political instability.

This week in Turkey, some members of the military tried to stage a coup to remove what they say is an increasingly authoritarian President Recep Erdogan. It appears to have failed. When launching a coup, one must be mindful of the fact that successful or not, you are going to create economic instability (and lower economic growth). Businesses won’t want to invest until they know what the revised “rules of the game are”. If you are successful, people are going to want to see what your policies are going to be before they commit money. If you are unsuccessful, people are still going to view your country’s government as unstable and that will reduce investment and economic growth too. But if you are still committed launching a military coup, here are some general principals to follow:

1.)    Remember that time is not on your side.

The key to a successful coup is to get yourself into power before anyone knows what the heck is going on. The longer the coup goes on, the less likely it is to be successful. You must convince the opposition quickly that the battle is over, you have won, and any further resistance would be in the service of a lost cause.

2.)    Make sure that a significant majority of the Army AND the Air Force are on your side.

Or at least that they are not opposed to you. The more opposition you have within the armed forces, the more effective resistance you can expect. If the military is split 50/50, you might even end up with a civil war on your hands. If you care about your country and not just your own power, you shouldn’t launch a coup where this is a likely outcome. In any case, it would help if there were a respected military person on your side to at least keep military opposition to you to a minimum. The Turkish Coup Plotters (TCP) did not do this. There doesn’t appear to have been any major military figures lending support. Capturing generals and holding them hostage (as the TCP appears to have done) may be necessary to prevent them from issuing orders and coordinating resistance to you, but other officers are likely to take up the slack and oppose you anyway. Also, not having the Air Force on your side will result in you not having air superiority, without which you won’t win a conventional conflict. You may even have your helicopters getting shot down, which is what appears to have happened.

3.)    Make sure that at least some level of the political opposition to the existing regime is on your side.

Erdogan may be increasingly authoritarian, but it is telling that everyone of all political stripes seems to have come out against the coup. I don’t mean that they just stayed silent and didn’t support it, they actually came out strongly against it. If you can’t get a fraction of the political opposition on your side, your coup really doesn’t have much of a chance.

4.)    Have someone of some stature ready to begin the task of governing that day.

Your men may love you. They may follow you anywhere, including into a coup. But outside of the men under your command, you are probably a no-name. To get the population to at least tacitly accept your coup, it takes more than that just showing up at the palace with a beret and a pistol and announcing that you are the big head cheese. It takes somebody with some stature to reassure the population that there is a steady hand guiding what will likely be a very uncertain transition and that the country is not about to collapse into chaos. Otherwise, you might end up chaos as everybody freaks out and opportunists launching their own rival bids for power. I am guessing that this isn’t really what you are going for.

5.)    Launch your coup at night.

This was one smart thing the TCP did. By launching the coup at night, the population is inside where you want them to be and not out on the street where they might get killed (or resist your coup). Ideally, the people will go bed, wake up to a new government (yours), get up and go about their day as if nothing had happened.

6.)    Take control of the major traffic choke points.

The TCP appears to have attempted to do this. Blocking the bridge over the Bosporus for example , and taking control of the airports, if done right, restricts movement of your opposition and hinders their ability to mount an effective response to you.

7.)    Launch the coup in the political AND economic centers of the country at the same time.

Kudos to the TCP for getting this right (or at least attempting to get this right). Nothing takes the fun out of a coup more than to capture the presidential palace, have control the political capital, broadcast from the President’s chair (now your chair) to the world telling them that you are in charge, only to find that the economic center of country is in full rebellion against you and you have done nothing to control that city. In a county like Turkey where the political capital and economic capital are not the same city, it is imperative that you grab control of both cities at the same time.

8.)    Take control of the major communication outlets.

Part of a successful coup is making the country think you are in full command, before you actually are. Having control of the T.V. & radio stations and blocking the internet are key both to project an image that you are in charge, but also to prevent your opposition from mobilizing support against you. The TCP, in the beginning, appears to have done all of these things.

9.)    Make sure the President doesn’t have FaceTime on his phone.

Otherwise, he might be able to call into the one TV station you didn’t get off the air and exhort his followers to take to the streets to oppose you. Once the followers are in the streets, either your coup is over (and you are at best looking at a long and painful prison term) or you need your troops to massacre them, which they may be reluctant to do given that your stated reason (probably) for the coup is to save the country from the bastard currently in charge. You don’t want to project the image (yet) that in fact you are the bastard that the country needs to be saved from.

10.)  Capture (or kill) the President.

If you do this, he can’t organize resistance to you. If you think killing him will inflame his supporters and generate violent resistance to you by making a martyr out of him, then capture him, hold him (and his family) in a secret place, and make sure he can’t communicate with anyone (like via Facetime or something). The TCP didn’t do this. They should have.

Launching a successful military coup is a lot harder than it looks. But if you follow these 10 rules, you greatly increase your chances of a happy outcome (for you anyway). Once you have deposed your opposition, you can spend the rest of your life building out your base of support through patronage (giving your wonderful, virtuous, non-corrupt friends access to enough wealth that they and their families are sure to support you) and through coercion (those awful, horrible, corrupt individuals who oppose you need to be made to forcibly enjoy your benevolent hospitality at one of your luxurious “resorts”, if you know what I mean).

With the Brexit vote behind us (in which immigration was a major issue) as well as the fact that immigration is a major topic in the U.S. presidential election, it is worth looking at the economic benefits and costs of the subject.

Economic theory and the ideology of free trade argues that the free flow of labor as a factor of production from one country to another will help lead to an economically efficient outcome. On the surface, it makes sense. A global labor pool that can move freely to where it is most rewarded (i.e. most productive) should, all things being equal (a key assumption in economic models), result in higher global output and a higher global standard of living. It should be mentioned that this free movement of people is but a subset of free flow of goods which would, in theory, allow countries to specialize in producing those products that they produce most efficiently and trade for those products that they do not. In short, higher global output=a higher standard of living. I myself have taught this theory in front of groups, and there is nothing wrong with it as a framework for thinking about general principles. In fact, it underpins the global economic paradigm that we are living under today, a paradigm that has seen increased living standards globally. Overall, it is hard to argue that this paradigm has been anything but successful.

However, the model underlying this paradigm which argues for the free movement of peoples largely assumes that people are the same. In other words, it ignores the costs associated with groups of people who think differently coming into close contact and economic competition with each other. The first problem present is that the newcomers present the natives with something that they didn’t have before, either skills or competition. If the newcomers are bringing skills that are lacking in the area (engineering, doctors, other technical skills), the immigrants may be welcomed (or not), but the benefits will become clear to most (when you are ill and your choice is between ‘no doctor’ and ‘Pakistani doctor’, you will probably go with the ‘Pakistani doctor’) and the country will likely be better off economically. However, if the immigrants are bringing competition, then they are not likely to be welcomed by the natives. The country may be better off on paper (higher GDP and a lower level of inflation due to reduced wage pressures), but there is going to be some resentment created and this is a cost.

One of the arguments put forward as an attempt to counter the resentment is that immigrants do work that the natives “won’t do”.  What isn’t much discussed is why natives “won’t do” the work. One possible reason is that wages in those industries have been pushed so low by immigrant competition that natives have better (i.e. higher paying) options to go to. Some studies have purported to show that in the U.S. that immigrants, don’t depress the overall wage picture, so it might not be that. However, it does seem difficult to believe that large immigration numbers, and the increased wage competition that it would bring, won’t have any downward pressure on wages. Another possible reason is that there are welfare benefits available to the natives and the difference between what they get on welfare and what they could earn in the workforce isn’t great enough to motivate the natives to get out of bed and go to work. For example, if I am getting $10/hr in welfare benefits or I could work at a job that pays $12/hr, is it worth my time to go through all the trouble for what effectively for me is a$2/hr job? Probably not. In any case, let’s get one thing clear: there are no jobs out there that natives “won’t do” if the wage is high enough. Whether or not immigrants are pushing the wages down from the “natives will do the job” range to the “natives won’t do the job” range depends on the industry and is an empirical question beyond the scope of this article. But the thought that they might be doing just isn’t an irrational thought produced only in the mind of a fevered racist.

The second cost of immigration, related to the first, is the feeling that your government isn’t standing up for you. In this case, the reality of what immigrants do or don’t do to wages, or whether they make a given country better off or worse off is really irrelevant. If the feeling is there, rational or not, it eats away at the legitimacy of the government. To the extent that immigration unsettles a portion of the native population, this is a cost. It may turn out to be a cost worth paying at a national level as immigration can bring in benefits to a country, but it is nonetheless a cost.

All governments need, at some level, at least tacit consent of the governed. Usually the population is much larger than the group of people actually governing, making overpowering brute force to control the population impractical over a long period of time. The fundamental legitimacy of all governments, whether tribal, democratic, communist, fascist, monarchy, or anything else, is the feeling that this ruling group is protecting the population from some danger. That danger could be an enemy force that would kill the population if it had the chance. The danger could be economic insecurity. Or it could be something else. The cohesion of society is dependent upon the perception that we are all in this together and the government, whatever faults or injustices that it commits, is at least willing and capable of protecting us from a greater harm.

When the governing class allows immigration to the point that a significant fraction of the population feels unsettled, threatened, and that their government isn’t standing up for them, the rulers lose legitimacy. From the point of view of those who have to compete with the newcomers for jobs (or having their wage bargaining position undercut by them), it appears that the government is siding with foreigners over them. At that point, these people start to wonder why they owe loyalty to a state that doesn’t stand up for them.  It is a fair question, and the resulting reduced social cohesion is an actual cost of immigration.

In conclusion, whether or not this becomes a problem for a state depends on a variety of factors (how much immigration, type of immigration (skilled labor/unskilled labor), the ability of the new immigrants to assimilate, whether or not they are a burden on the social system etc.). How these factors play out will also depend on the national culture, and how accepting it is of immigrants in general. This is not an argument against all immigration. But it is an argument against the idea that immigration is cost-free and always a net benefit to the host society. If handled properly, a country can be enriched and can benefit handsomely from it. On the other hand, if handled poorly, it can delegitimize a government and destabilize a society.

With the Brexit vote behind us, the American presidential election in front of us, and some nationalist movements in Europe demanding a ‘Brexit’ referendum of their own, people are making their voices heard against the rule of ‘experts’. For their part, the reaction of the experts has ranged from confusion to dismissal of their opposition as ‘idiots’ (or other not very nice names). Without a doubt, from California to Paris, ordinary people are pushing back against a class of people who think they know best.

But why?

The reason can be summed up thus: the experts simply haven’t been doing a good job. There seems to be a sense in national capitals (where many experts reside) that the population has gone ‘insane’, either by supporting Donald Trump or voting for a Brexit (i.e. not listening to the experts). This really shouldn’t be surprising considering the number of Americans (7 in 10 as of last year) who think that America is still in recession.

Think about that.

The recession (at least as statistically defined) has been over for 7 years and yet nearly 70% of Americans don’t seem to have gotten the memo. When the perception of 70% of your country is that you haven’t been able to get the economy back on track for 8 years, you can’t be surprised when they question whether you really know what you are doing and stop listening to you.

But why have the experts failed? I believe that there are several reasons.

1.)    The experts think that they know more than they actually do.

There seems to be a human psychological tendency to overestimate our knowledge in many things, and experts are not immune from this either. The world is a big, complex thing. It is unreasonable to think that anyone can get their arms around it, understand it, and make the right call in most cases. The problem is, experts think that they can, and they expect you to think that they can too. In financial markets, how many ‘experts’ are out there on T.V. touting this or that? Lots. How many of them are right at predicting the future consistently? Almost none (if any). Sure, they might get a few calls right here or there, but then they will get others wrong. In short, they think that they know more than they actually do.

2.)    The experts don’t have as much power as they think that they do.

One area where the experts imagine that they have a lot of control is the ability to control the economy. Around the world, central banks and other governmental agencies are trying to steer the economy. While monetary and fiscal policy can have some effect on an economy, there is an implied assumption that central banks can steer economies like a pilot steers an aircraft. Talk of ‘soft landings’ and other such expression imply a level of skill and control that simply doesn’t exist. On a battlefield, leaders on both sides try and control the action. They get information, issue orders, make corrections, develop tactics, all the while chaos is erupting and the situation is developing rapidly. Sometimes they make the right call, and sometimes they don’t. But most generals in large battles, if honest, will tell you that they don’t really have control of the situation (which is constantly changing) and are just making their best guess. A modern economy is a much more complex animal than a battle, and central bankers (and other experts) are often just making their best guess. They are not actually in control.

3.)    The experts rely on faulty numbers.

One of the primary numbers that they rely on is the unemployment number. Currently, the unemployment rate is 4.7%. According to economic theory, this is the full-employment rate. And yet, the majority of the country thinks we are in recession. The reason is the unemployment figure is fake. It doesn’t take into account people who have given up looking for work. In the past, this adjustment didn’t really have a distorting effect on reality as this category wasn’t a large number of people. However today, it is. Millions of people have given up looking for work due to lack of jobs and are not counted as unemployed. So the numbers are giving one picture, and the reality is something else entirely.

4.)    The expert’s assumptions on how the world works is outdated.

In the various agencies and departments populated by experts, certain assumptions about how the world works have become institutionalized. In other words, these assumptions are not questioned or revised, but they guide everything that the experts do. However, when the world changes, slow-moving institutions are not quick to react and change their assumptions. Expert’s, who have achieved their positions by relying on old assumptions tend to double down and hold to those old assumptions that have been so good to them. But that simply makes the expert’s and institutions appear out-of-touch and ‘stupid’ as their actions seem to become more and more disconnected from the reality that people are seeing right in front of them. The result is that people lose faith.

Going forward, whether people regain faith in experts and institutions will depend on whether those institutions begin to perform in a way that positively influences people’s lives in a visible and tangible way. Currently, the reaction of the experts (with a few notable exceptions), rather than using the Brexit vote as cause for reflection, have lashed out at the dumb, stupid, racist, masses. The idea that they, the experts, could be mistaken is not something that they are prepared to accept (yet). The fact is, experts do tend to be very smart people, and they have the potential to play a very positive role in their respective societies. Currently, their actions are out of touch with the times that we live in. Assuming that they are able to reform, they can win back the trust of the people. Until then, they can expect discontent and ‘rebellion’ from various parts of society.