Don't Freak Out About The Election

The case for cautious optimism

Struck by lightning, sounds pretty frightening
But you know the chances are so small
Stuck by a bee sting, nothing but a B-thing
Better chance you're gonna buy it at the mall
But it's a twenty-three-or-four-to-one
That you can fall in love by the end of this song
So get up, get up
Tell the bookie put a bet on "not a damn thing will go wrong"

—BNL “Odds Are”

I spent election night playing poker with two nerdy philosophy friends of mine (including the venerable Amos Wollen) both of whom were, like me, rooting for Harris. Over the course of the night, we saw the Betting Odds’ probability of a Harris victory slowly wind down until they reached almost zero. But despite the bad news, none of us were particularly upset; yes the result is bad in expectation, but bad things happen all the time, and we generally don’t spend time moping about them.

Later in the night, I texted with some liberal friends of mine. Few of them shared my rosy demeanor—one reported wanting to die (not literally, of course) and my mother reported feeling like she was going to throw up. Someone I met who doesn’t even live in the United States reported being very nervous and depressed about the election results. Tens or hundreds of millions of liberals all across the country are in a state of severe worry and panic based on the results of the election.

I think this is mostly unjustified. Those who are freaking out should chill! I’m not happy about the results of the election—I’d have liked it to go the other way—but I think freaking out makes little sense and is counterproductive. I’ll list eight reasons not to freak out.

First of all, freaking out about things makes people miserable and accomplishes nothing. It’s one thing to freak out about a problem if you can do something about it, but just freaking out for its own sake isn’t productive. Now, I know people can’t control what they freak out about, but this at the very least means people should try to minimize their freaking out.

Second, it’s incredibly difficult to know how things will turn out. While I think Trump is worse in expectation than Harris, it’s very hard to know if anything very bad will turn out. Politics is so complicated and different candidates affect so many different issues that it’s almost impossible to forecast thing.

For example, during the Bush presidency, Democrats were understandably freaked out about his policies. Yet Bush adopted a little known program known as PEPFAR, set up to combat HIV internationally. This program ended up saving around 25 million lives, meaning that Bush may have saved the most lives of any other president in recent memory. If a guy like Bush who started the Iraq war and killed hundreds of thousands of people can incidentally do more good than any other president in my lifetime, you shouldn’t be confident that things will turn out badly!

I remember reading in 2018 that Trump’s win was undermining populists in Europe who were embarrassed by the Trump fiasco. Now, I don’t know how true that is, and was recently unable to track down the articles claiming it, but it just shows the extent to which the world is unpredictable. Suppose, for instance, that Romney had won in 2012—in hindsight, the Trump train may never have taken off, for Romney would likely have cruised to reelection. This point is made well by the venerable Glenn, who correctly forecasted this election (so did I, making this a good day for my Manifold markets portfolio, though a bad day, in expectation, for the country), who writes:

If you want some concrete examples to better understand what this means, consider the following: From an ex ante perspective, I would have supported every Democratic candidate in the past six presidential elections, since and including 2000. But there’s a very good case that it would have been better if half of those elections were won by Republicans. If Al Gore had won in 2000, he wouldn’t have launched PEPFAR and saved 25 million lives. If Mitt Romney had won in 2012, he probably would have stopped Trump from becoming a serious political figure. And if Trump had won in 2020, he wouldn’t have been radicalized by losing the election, tried to figure out how to staff his second administration with competent yes men, and become the favorite to win the election this year.

(If you’re wondering: how could one so wise outperform your expectations, high as they no-doubt are, wait till you hear how based Glenn is on fish welfare, and relatedly, the vitally important fish sex question—Glenn thinks that fish should have less sex, because when they have sex they give birth to millions of offspring most of whom live shitty lives. I’d suggest teaching them the pull-out method).

Given how difficult it is to forecast the future, you shouldn’t freak out about it. “Oh no, an extra 5% of disastrous outcomes.” Until you’re confident that something really bad will happen, no use being scared about it. While Trump makes things worse in expectation, we just don’t know how things will turn out.

Third, bad things are constantly happening. There are constantly wars raging, children dying of poverty, and so on. Few people spend much time freaking out about those things—almost no one wakes up and gets extremely scared and upset about, say, the Sudan civil war. I think we should try to approach political issues the way we do other problems: when we can do something about them, we should try, but sitting around moping isn’t productive.

(Relatedly: if you want to do something about the world’s biggest problems rather than mope, you can give money to GiveWell’s top charities, identified as the most effective based on rigorous, high-quality data. Don’t just feel miserable about bad things—do as much as you can to stop them).

Fourth, I think you shouldn’t be pessimistic about the state of the world. The world has been getting dramatically better over time. However bad you think Trump is, it’s nothing compared to the long, steady march of progress over time. I think Trump is pretty unlikely to do anything dramatically terrible—the most likely scenario is that he’ll be roughly like he was between 2016 and 2020. It wasn’t great, I wasn’t a fan of many of his policies, but the world didn’t end. Even in the worst case scenario, the world will still be dramatically better than it used to be, even as near as 2003.

For this reason, I make the following forecast: the world in 2028 will be much better than the world of 2024. When you look at a chart like the one below, and realize that millions more people can afford to put food on their families, that billions more children are growing up happy and well-fed, it’s hard to be depressed about how the world is going:

Fifth, there’s the best news possible: God exists! This is a God who can work good from evil, who is providentially ordering the world towards the greatest imaginable good. God’s existence is believed by lots of very smart people, so you should at the very least think it’s not that unlikely—not below one in a thousand odds. All of the worlds horrors are nothing compared to the infinite awesomeness of the future if God exists, a future where we will spend forever in the best possible place with all our loved ones, having experiences so good we can barely imagine them, experiencing love, joy, and contentment more fully than we could ever dream of. Compared to such a glorious future, even if it’s low probability, the worlds problems are but a tiny of bad being deposited into an ocean of endless joy and greatness. If there’s a one in a million chance this is true, that mere sliver of hope ends up being far more consequential, in expected value terms, than the election, or any of the world’s problems.

Sixth, related to the future being hard to forecast, remember: millions of people are hopeful about the results of the election. A genius friend of mine was hoping Trump would win, being optimistic that smart tech people will be running the show, with Trump as the public-facing Muppet. I don’t think he’s right, but if millions of smart and informed people disagree with you on whether some event is a tragedy, you shouldn’t be that confident in your answer.

Seventh, I think the odds of any severe restriction on rights is pretty low. While I’ve elsewhere argued that Trump is a threat to Democracy and I think he raises the risk of some extreme Democratic action, odds are still fairly low. He still has to contend with the courts, pushing for a third term would be extreme and unprecedented, and by the end of his second term, he’ll be 82—few people become dictators at 82.

When it comes to abortion, even if we ignore all the complexity around abortion, I don’t think policy will change under Trump. He’s said repeatedly that he doesn’t want a national abortion ban and could never pass it—it’s too politically toxic. Abortion law is quite unlikely to change under a Trump administration, for better or for worse.

While he’s likely to enact tariffs, these will raise prices but not be the end of the world. This is, in my view, by far the most likely result of a Trump presidency: bad policy, erratic action, but nothing too catastrophic. This is roughly what happened last time. Trump is unlikely to make your life considerably worse.

Eight, humans have a natural tendency to inflate threats. Over and over again, people have claimed that some upcoming event will be the end of the world or will catastrophically destroy America. It’s always easy to come up with some scenario for how things could go badly wrong, but they mostly turn out fine—the world keeps chugging along, things keep getting better.

I’d have much preferred a Harris victory, but his victory is no cause for vomiting or existential crisis.

Sure, things go wrong but I'll take my chances
Odds are long, so why not play?
Struck by lightning sounds pretty frightening
But you know the chances are so small
Hit by the A-Train crashed in an airplane
Better chance you're gonna buy it at the mall
But it's 23 or 4 to 1 that you could fall in love by the end of this song
So, get up, get up no, I'm never gonna let up
So, you might as well sing along

The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we're gonna be alright
Odds are we're gonna be alright tonight
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we're gonna be alright
Odds are we're gonna be alright for another night