Reality TV politics gives Donald Trump a shot at the White House: Don Pittis

"This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States," PresidentBarackObamasaidin response to media questions aboutpresumptive RepublicancandidateDonald Trump.

Sorry Mr. President, you're wrong. Politics has always been partly areality show. It has always been partly entertainment. Trump's advantage is that when it comes to reality shows, he's had the most experience.

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Trump's show, The Apprentice, was ostensibly about business, but it wasn't really. Reality shows, like politics, are an illusion.

They both pretend to be about real life,but they oversimplify. They make people think they actually understand the complexities ofeconomics and business.

The trouble is, of course, that no one really knows the answers to our hardest economic questions.

Our highly educated experts cannot be sure what will happen when they cut interest rates below zero. Theyreally don't know whether flooding the world with cheap money will eventually come back and create unintended consequences.

Voters are even less equipped.

For all our celebration of democracy, the vast majority of voters don't understand bond markets or derivatives.As we saw in the U.S. property crash, many don't understand central banking or interest rates.

Many have apre-18thcentury understanding of international trade. They imagine a world where countries profit fromexporting as much as possible and importing as little as theycan.

Keeping it simple

Politicians have known for years that you have to keep it simple.

For instance, some of us may realizethat understanding quantum computing is essential to keepingNorth America's place in the world economic order. But even Prime Minister JustinTrudeau celebrated for his public definitionthat madea splash on social mediaknew a real explanation of quantumcomputing would have gone over our heads and his.

PM has fun explaining quantum computing

8 years ago

Duration 1:28

Justin Trudeau responds to a flip question from reporter with a good-natured, not-so-flip answer

The problem with realityshow-style simplification is that for the folks at home it depends on some sort of basic honesty and expertise from the people doing the simplifying. The audience really isn't qualified to catch the errors, whether intentional or honest mistakes.

The necessary oversimplification of the world by politicians may berelated to a phenomenon known in the software industry as"bikeshedding" orParkinson's Law of Triviality.

Essentially, it's an observation by British naval historian and authorCyril Northcote Parkinson,who found that in a committee charged with making decisions about a new nuclear plant, memberswere relatively silentuntil they got to thetrivialissue of how to build the bike shed, when everyone had an opinion.

People are often ill-equipped to consider complicated matters and so focus on the trivial.

The wall

Grasping the details of how the economy works is difficult and is almost impossible to explain in a sound bite. But building a wall to keep out Mexicans, that'seasy to say. Any fool can understand it.

"We will build the wall, it will be a beautiful wall, it will be a big wall," Trump reiteratedat a rallyon Saturday.

Even if he were capable,Trump would quickly lose his populist audience if he began explaining the labour market, demographics, world money flows and trade in anything approaching theirtrue complexity.

Thatwall idea may be one of Trump'spronouncements thatObamasaid"would potentially break the financial system."

Trump has also suggestedtossing out Federal Reserve chairJanet Yellenonce he takes power.Even worse, Trump hinted that if he's elected, the U.S. mightrenege on a portion of its debt. Sticking it to the man mayplay in Peoria, but currency and bond markets were deeply troubled by the comments.

Calling the North American Free Trade Agreement "one of the great economicdisasters" at the same rally was also a good reality show comment. "Bring the jobs back" may be the reality TV slogan to getTrump elected, but many economistsworry itcould create a replay of the GreatDepression of the 1930s.

Sole survivor

All politicians, includingObamaand Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton oversimplify. There is just no other way to explain complex ideas briefly to a mass of voters.

Trump isn't alone in offering glib solutions to the complex problems facing the world, he's just very good at it. In the world of reality television politics, he's the one withthe most experience.

It's fair to say it's not the job of politicians to understand all the details. Weelect politicians tohire experts to run the complex bits of our economy.

In the past, it has been the job of experts and journalists and commentatorsto listen to those pronouncements, weigh them and help voters decide what is true.

But as The Donald tweets about his taco lunch and media organizations pass on his reality show comments verbatim, it may be that for a large majority of the U.S. population, the analysis stage has been left out and they think of reality show simplicity as truth.

And just as Trump's Republican challengers have been voted off the island one by one, it suddenly seems within the realm of possibility that the former host of The Apprentice will be able to use his reality show skills to become the sole survivor.

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