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Buzz Feed
5 days ago
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
Surprising Age Group Most Vulnerable To Conspiracies
When it comes to falling down a rabbit hole with conspiracy theories ― QAnon, the 'Plandemic' conspiracy theory ― it's young people, not older demographics, who are more prone to buy into such beliefs. Age is the most significant predictor of conspiracy beliefs among all other factors, according to a study that was recently published in the journal Political Psychology. And it's people under 35 who are consistently more likely to endorse conspiratorial ideas than any other age group. 'From age 35 on, susceptibility to conspiracy theories decreases relatively steadily across older age groups,' said Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau, a research Fellow at the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Political conspiracy theories are pushing more and more family relationships to the breaking point. It's not uncommon to hear about siblings who are estranged over extremist political views or people who 'lost' their family members to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that posits that a satanic cabal of elites and pedophiles is working behind the scenes to orchestrate global events and enslave children. Conspiracy theories increasingly affect our elections, too; QAnon believers came out heavily for President Trump in recent elections; to them, Trump is a white-knight figure destined to bring down the aforementioned cabal. (That's what's made his current handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files such a divisive issue for many.) And voter fraud conspiracy theories drove thousands to violently storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an act of domestic terrorism that threatened the nation's peaceful transfer of power. Given the growing impact of conspiracy theories in our political and personal lives, Bordeleau and Daniel Stockemer, a political studies professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, thought it was high time to find out what factors most influence people buying in. 'We were really curious to understand why some people adhere to some really unbelievable narratives like the flat Earth theory and QAnon,' Bordeleau told HuffPost. 'Our results don't imply that all young people are attracted to all conspiracy theories, but what we can demonstrate is that younger people are more likely to believe various conspiracy theories than older individuals. If you assumed it might be Boomers who most frequently fall into conspiracy theory traps ― there are countless depressing stories in online forums of grown children detailing how their Fox News-watching parents fell into a QAnon rabbit hole after 'doing research' ― you're not alone. Bordeleau figured that would be the case, too. Younger citizens being more conspiratorial as a whole 'definitely goes against the typical stereotype of the older uncle at the Christmas table exposing the latest conspiracy theories,' Bordeleau said. 'Initially, we were quite surprised to see that younger people were most likely to believe in conspiracies.' To find all this out, the researchers conducted a meta analysis ― a kind of 'study of studies' ― which synthesized the results of 191 peer-reviewed articles published between 2014 and 2024. This huge dataset, which included over 374,000 participants, suggested a 'robust' association between young age and belief in conspiracies, Bordeleau said. 'To confirm that, we ran our own original multinational survey of more than 6,000 people across six diverse countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the U.S. and South Africa,' he explained. Regardless of the country, the results were the same: Age was the most potent predictor of conspiratorial belief systems, more than a person's gender, level of education or income. So why are younger generations more intrigued by conspiracy theories? Bordeleau and Stockemer think there are three interconnected reasons. 'First, the fact that younger people have a deep sense of political disaffection and alienation,' Bordeleau said. 'Second, there's a tendency for younger people to adopt an activist style of political participation and be exposed to more radical environments, where conspiracy theories thrive.' (QAnon originated on the dark web first, with various ideas circulating on 4chan and 8chan as early as 2017.) Lastly, there's the self-confidence factor, or lack thereof. Self-esteem fluctuates throughout our lives, but studies show that adolescence tends to be a period of heightened lower self-esteem, particularly for young girls. 'Low self-esteem can partly explain why younger people are attracted to conspiracy theories,' Bordeleau said. 'It becomes a way to cope with feelings of powerlessness.' Bordeleau said he'd love to further research the socialization component of conspiracy beliefs: how young people are exposed to these narratives, for instance, and whether or not social pressures play a part. On a wider social level, he hopes that more time and resources are put into looking for ways to help young people become more media literate. 'It might be through education reform or targeted interventions or policy changes, but we are committed to leveraging our research to help,' he said. HuffPost.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Malevolent Laziness
What a bunch of buffoons. If men could actually die of shame, then Donald Trump's economic team would be toast—instead, it is only their reputations that have been buried. As I have been writing for some time, Donald Trump's most fundamental character flaw—his laziness—has been his country's saving grace, at least at times. Trump is an aspiring caudillo whose political models are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and a would-be tyrant who attempted to stage a coup d'état after losing the 2020 election to a barely sentient Joe Biden—but, as bad as he was and is, he could have been and could be a great deal worse if not for the fact that he is unbelievably lazy, a Fox News-watching, social-media-addicted couch potato of a chief executive who might have wielded the levers of power to greater malevolent effect if he had bothered to work at his craft a little bit. But the so-called reciprocal tariffs are shockingly lazy even by Trumpian standards. Tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers (which include things like environmental and safety regulations that disadvantage U.S.-sourced goods in overseas markets) are a complex subject: Like most advanced countries, the United States works from a shared international system for classifying goods for tariff purposes, with more than 5,000 categories of traded commodities that comprise about 98 percent of all the products involved in international trade. Trump talks about tariffs as though he were talking about a bank setting loan rates: 'They charge us 20 percent, we'll charge them 20 percent,' that sort of thing. In fact, most countries that collect tariffs collect them at different rates across that group of 5,000 commodities, and most advanced countries, including the United States, collect at different rates depending on their trade relationship with the country in question. There's no single number that captures it. There are potentially thousands of variables for each country with which we exchange goods and services. Also, many commodities are traded in only one direction: For example, U.S. fruit wholesalers import mangosteens from India and Thailand, and there is a tariff category for that fruit, but there isn't any reciprocal duty on U.S.-grown mangosteens exported to India and Thailand, because there aren't any U.S.-grown mangosteens. That's a little thing (unless you are a mangosteen farmer) but the same holds true for major manufactured goods, too: Switzerland has a very sophisticated and productive economy, but there are no major automobile manufacturers based in the country (there are a couple of boutique firms) and, hence, nobody thinks much about tariffs on Swiss-made cars. Japan is a major automobile manufacturer, and, in spite of what you'll hear the American president claim, Tokyo charges no tariffs on imported U.S. cars. (U.S. automakers have a tough time selling cars in Japan for other reasons, such as GM's reputation for producing horrible junk.) Japan does have a tariff-and-quota system when it comes to imported rice, and U.S.-grown rice is taxed at $2/kilogram if imports exceed 770,000 metric tons per year. The United States is the largest exporter of rice to Japan, and total Japanese imports of U.S. rice typically do not run much more than half the quota figure, meaning U.S. rice exports to Japan are effectively tariff-free. Trump claims Japan imposes a 700-percent tariff on U.S. rice, which is, per usual, an idiotic lie. Accounting for all that—thousands of categories of goods, hundreds of trading partners, complex quotas, several different kinds of trading relationships—would take some work. And these Trump people hate work. That's why Elon Musk's idiot DOGE boys and their colleagues get into so much trouble by doing things such as eliminating Ebola-prevention programs: They are too damned lazy to do some reading and figure out what they are actually dealing with. That's why they deport the wrong people and text their war plans to what's-his-name over at that magazine. They're lazy. They don't do the reading, and they don't do their homework. They won't look past their phones. Rather than actually figuring out what tariff rates would actually be reciprocal, the Trump administration has come up with a completely meaningless calculation: The 'reciprocal' tariff rate has nothing at all to do with tariffs charged by our trading partners—it is simply the trade deficit (goods only; services are excluded) divided by total goods exports divided by two. Why two? No reason. It just sounded good to somebody. My old National Review colleague Kevin Hassett currently serves as director of the National Economic Council, and if he hasn't died from embarrassment over this buffoonery or committed whatever is the economist's version of seppuku, he ought to have his doctorate revoked. Working for Trump has never been good for anybody's reputation, but who wants to end his career as the Rudy Giuliani of economists? Tariffs are not the only reason—or even the main reason—for imbalanced trade among nations. U.S. firms and consumers buy a lot of tropical fruit and low-cost goods from firms in poor countries where the people do not buy a lot of Boeing products or $300 selvedge jeans made in the United States on account of their being, you know, poor. The notion that international trade ultimately should balance overall is questionable, but the notion that bilateral trade relationships should balance—that exports from the United States (GDP/capita: $83,000) to Bangladesh (GDP/capita: $2,550) are going to match up with exports from Bangladesh to the United States—is entirely bananas. The United States consumes about 15 percent of Bangladesh's exports, which adds up to a few billion dollars in our $28 trillion economy—but 15 percent of U.S. goods exports would equal the entirety of Bangladesh's private consumption or nearly 70 percent of its total GDP. And 15 percent of total U.S. exports would exceed Bangladesh's GDP. But consumers of Bangladesh-made T-shirts (garments are the country's largest export) are going to be subjected to a 37 percent sales tax by the Trump administration because Americans are being brutally victimized by the wily Bangladeshis, who have conspired their way to a median monthly income of less than $300. Apparently, we've got to get us some of that top-level economic thinking. You clowns.
