Gideon Rachman writes:

Mr Trump has a legitimate claim to three other kinds of "genius": political genius, instinctive genius and evil genius.

If this is a plea not to under-estimate Trump, it's good. It might however be read as an example of a form of outcome bias - a tendency to infer from success that there was intentionality and skill behind it. This causes us to impute qualities to the rich and successful that might not be there.

Sharks and tapeworms are well-adapted to their environments. This is not because of any skill on their part. It's because they have been selected to be so. Natural selection is a process whereby some blind undesigned and unintended mutations are selected for.

Markets are similar. They too are selection mechanisms. What's more, as in natural selection, the winners or survivors might be just lucky. Three things tell us this: Paul Ormerod and Bridget Rosewell show that companies know little about the effect of their strategies; Jonathan Haskel and colleagues show that a lot of productivity growth comes (pdf) from entry and exit rather than incumbents upping their game; and Alex Coad shows how firm growth is largely random. All this is consistent with markets selecting among blind mutations.

Now, in the just-so stories which Econ 101ers tell, this doesn't matter; markets select efficient firms which serve customers well even if that efficiency was dumb luck.

The problem is, though, that selection mechanisms don't always work so nicely. My favourite example of this is 19^th century patent medicines, which thrived (pdf) for decades despite being only placebos - for reasons which, as I've shown elsewhere, also explain the rise of populism. Markets can select for psychopaths, the irrationally over-confident, lucky but clueless risk-takers or mediocrities who fit in. The message of Steven Teles' and Brink Lindsey's The Captured Economy is that the US economy now selects for rent-seekers rather than public servants.

Politics is also of course a set of selection mechanisms. And these too have gone awry. Trump became president not despite his lack of intellectual or moral virtue but because of it. As Kevin Williamson has written:

It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. That's what all that ridiculous stuff about "winning" was all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives - and how "smart people" came to be a term of abuse....[People] today are celebrating Donald Trump - not in spite of his being a dishonest, crude serial adulterer but because of it. His dishonesty [we are told] is simply the mark of a savvy businessman, his vulgarity the badge of his genuineness and lack of "political correctness," and his pitiless abuse of his several wives and children the mark of a genuine "alpha male."

In this sense, I both disagree and agree with Rachman. I disagree that he's a genius; you could carve a better man out of a banana. But I agree he must be taken seriously because he embodies a massive problem for western capitalism - that mechanisms in the economy and in politics that should select for at least adequacy now often select for the worst.