> Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular c

> Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular country cannot be "(dis)proven" one way or the other based on low-dimensional observations of (alleged) behavior and motivations of people in another country. Each individual person holds an incredibly complex set of beliefs in their heads that drive their actions. Some people go to school to learn some things about human behavior and cognition, and then get jobs hypothesizing about the causal underpinnings of human behavior, and then broadcast these hypotheses to the world from where they are picked up and stored in other minds, which then also proceed to hypothesize about other things based on the aggregate of information (of which this is only a small part) they have consumed in the past. These hypotheses, the ideas the mind conjures from thin air, seem largely indistinguishable from reality, but this is a clever illusion that (allegedly) arose out of millions of years of evolution. Seeing speculative beliefs in other people is easy, seeing them in oneself is not so easy - or so psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy would have us believe.