There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!

The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s

Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…

Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…

…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.

The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.

Parts of the feet are obscured by the grass and under the stomach, and the lens distortion affects perspective. I think platypus is the most plausible subject.

Only males, and primarily during the breeding season. Interesting biology.

To an extent, this is already happening. I work in manufacturing, and the last couple of years there was more demand for our product than our factories were physically capable of producing, and prices were raised to weed out the number of customer orders to what we could handle. Projections for this year are for softened demand, and sales expects to have to offer significant price cuts to keep enough orders for our manufacturing lines to stay busy.

Collective “we have enough stuff and will buy less” at work.