“Tariffs will bring back manufacturing jobs.”
“Deport all illegal immigrants.”
Simple statements. They make intuitive sense. They offer clear solutions to real problems.
Except the tariffs have led to 59,000 manufacturing job losses since April 2025—eight straight months of decline. And the deportation push has resulted in federal agents shooting citizens in Minneapolis streets—three people shot in January alone, including a mother of three and an ICU nurse.
So what went wrong? Was it just bad policy? Poor implementation? Bad luck?
No. It’s something deeper. It’s a fundamental problem with how most Americans think about complex problems.
The Difference Between Complicated and Complex
There’s a big difference between understanding something that’s complicated and understanding something that’s complex.
A car engine is complicated. It has hundreds of parts, and they all have to work together in precise ways. But if you understand each part and how they connect, you can predict exactly what will happen when you turn the key.
An economy is complex. An immigration system is complex. They’re millions of people making billions of decisions every day, all interconnected through feedback loops and cascading effects. Change one thing, and you don’t just affect one other thing—you set off a chain reaction that interacts with other chain reactions in ways that are genuinely hard to predict.
Most Americans are pretty good at understanding complicated things. We can follow step-by-step processes. We can learn how machines work. We can understand cause and effect when it’s direct and visible.
But we’re terrible at complex systems. And that’s a huge problem, because almost everything that matters in modern life—the economy, healthcare, education, immigration, the environment—is a complex system.
How We Actually Think: The Linear Trap
Here’s what I’ve noticed watching people discuss policy over the years. Most people think in straight lines:
If A, then B.
- If we raise the minimum wage, businesses will have to pay workers more.
- If we cut taxes, people will have more money to spend.
- If we impose tariffs, imports will cost more so people will buy domestic.
- If we deport illegal immigrants, Americans will get those jobs.
This is what educators call “linear thinking” or “cause-and-effect reasoning.” It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete. Dangerously incomplete.
Because in complex systems, it’s never just A→B. It’s more like:
If A, then B, C, D, and E… which loop back and affect A in ways we didn’t expect.
Example One: The Real Story of What Happened With Tariffs
Let me show you what I mean using the tariff situation, because I spent time digging into the actual data and it’s a perfect example of the difference between linear thinking and systems thinking.
The Linear Story (What We Were Told)
Tariffs make imports expensive → Americans buy domestic → Factories reopen → Jobs return
Simple. Logical. Wrong.
The Systems Story (What Actually Happened)
First, businesses aren’t stupid. When they heard tariffs were coming, they stockpiled like crazy. Imports in Q1 2025 were 26% above normal as companies bought up everything they could before the tariffs hit. Then imports crashed in April—not because of tariffs working, but because everyone had already filled their warehouses.
Second, those tariffs didn’t just affect finished products. They affected the raw materials and components American manufacturers need. A factory making cars in Michigan suddenly pays 25% more for steel, 10% more for computer chips, 25% more for tires. Their costs went up, making them less competitive, not more.
Third, other countries retaliated. China, the EU, and others imposed their own tariffs on American exports. So while we were “protecting” American manufacturers from imports, we were simultaneously destroying their export markets. Agricultural exports to China dropped from $12.3 billion to $3.1 billion.
Fourth, we don’t actually have the capacity to produce most of what we import. We offshored our manufacturing ecosystem over 40 years. The supplier networks are gone. The skilled workers retired. The factories closed. You can’t just flip a switch and bring that back. It would take decades of investment in education, infrastructure, and supply chains.
Fifth, even if we did bring manufacturing back, modern factories are automated. They’re not going to create 1970s-style factory jobs. They’ll create some high-skilled engineering jobs and a lot of robots.
Sixth, the tariffs function as a tax on American consumers. We’re paying higher prices for everything without getting the promised jobs. We collected $287 billion in tariff revenue—money that came straight out of American pockets, costing the average household between $1,500 and $3,800 more per year.
See the difference? The linear story had one cause and one effect. The systems story has multiple causes creating multiple effects that loop back and interact with each other in ways that completely change the outcome.
Example Two: The Minneapolis Shootings
On January 7, 2026, Renee Good—a 37-year-old mother of three—was shot and killed by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minneapolis, less than a mile from where George Floyd died.
Seventeen days later, Alex Pretti—a 33-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen—was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent at another immigration enforcement action in the same city.
These weren’t random events. They were the predictable outcome of linear thinking applied to a complex system.
The Linear Story
Too many illegal immigrants → Deport them → Problem solved
The Systems Story
First, we had decades of essentially non-enforcement. Not because of any formal policy, but because businesses needed workers, employers didn’t verify documentation properly, and enforcement was inconsistent. This allowed millions of people to establish lives here—jobs, homes, kids in school, community ties.
Second, these weren’t people living in hiding. They were embedded in the economy. Construction, agriculture, food processing, hospitality—entire industries became dependent on this workforce. Their kids were in our schools. They were our neighbors.
Third, the Trump administration suddenly flipped to aggressive enforcement with specific quotas: arrest 1,200 to 1,500 people per day. Field offices were told to aim for 75 arrests per day, increasing to 3,000 daily by May 2025. Officials told agents to “turn the creative knob up to 11.”
Fourth, when you need to triple your arrest numbers quickly, you have to either work existing agents to exhaustion or pull in people who aren’t trained for this work. Homeland Security Investigations agents—trained for counterterrorism and child exploitation—were reassigned to immigration enforcement.
Fifth, communities that had lived alongside these immigrants for decades viewed aggressive enforcement as morally wrong. Legal observers started showing up to document enforcement actions, which is constitutionally protected.
Sixth, this created confrontational situations: quota-driven agents trying to meet numbers, community members trying to protect neighbors, inexperienced agents with weapons, cameras recording everything, and enormous pressure to succeed.
The result? Renee Good, who was acting as a legal observer, was shot when an agent claimed she tried to run him over. Video suggests she was trying to leave and the agent stepped in front of her moving vehicle, then shot her multiple times as she drove away.
Alex Pretti stepped between an ICE agent and a woman the agent had just violently shoved into a snowbank. He had his phone up recording, his other hand raised with open palm. The agent pepper-sprayed him. Minutes later, Border Patrol agents shot and killed him, claiming he pointed a gun at them. Two sworn witness statements say he never brandished a weapon—his hands were up trying to help the woman who’d been pushed down.
None of this was unpredictable. It was the inevitable collision of:
- Decades of non-enforcement creating established communities
- Sudden aggressive quota-driven enforcement
- Community resistance to what they saw as morally wrong
- Constitutional protections for observers documenting police actions
- Inexperienced agents under pressure with weapons
- Confrontational situations in neighborhoods where people knew each other
The problem isn’t that any individual fact in the linear story was wrong. We do have illegal immigration. The problem is that this one true thing is swimming in an ocean of other true things that all interact.
Why This Is So Hard for Us
After spending time thinking about this, I’ve realized there are a few reasons Americans struggle so much with systems thinking:
Our Brains Weren’t Built for This
Human brains evolved to handle immediate, local problems. “Lion in the grass” is a problem our brains are great at solving. “How will this policy affect an economy of 330 million people over the next five years” is not something we’re naturally wired to grasp.
Linear thinking feels right because it matches how we experience daily life. I flip a switch, the light comes on. Direct cause, immediate effect. But economies, immigration systems, and social systems don’t work like light switches.
Our Education System Doesn’t Teach It
We learn subjects in isolation. History class happens in one room, economics in another, science somewhere else. We never learn how these systems interact with each other.
When’s the last time a high school class walked students through how a policy change ripples through an economy, affecting different industries in different ways, which then affects tax revenue, which affects government services, which affects consumer behavior, which loops back to affect the original policy?
We teach facts and formulas. We don’t teach systems thinking.
Our Media Makes It Worse
Complex systems analysis doesn’t fit in a tweet. It doesn’t make a good sound bite. It doesn’t generate clicks.
“Tariffs protect American jobs” is simple, emotionally satisfying, and fits in a headline.
“Deport illegal immigrants” fits on a sign.
“Tariffs create a complex mix of input cost increases, retaliatory effects, supply chain disruptions, and consumer price impacts that result in net job losses despite some short-term gains in protected sectors” doesn’t fit anywhere.
“Decades of non-enforcement created established communities, and sudden quota-driven enforcement without addressing root causes creates violent confrontations between agents and citizens trying to protect their neighbors” doesn’t work as a campaign slogan.
So the simple story wins, even when it’s wrong.
We Mistake Confidence for Knowledge
There’s a psychological phenomenon where the less someone understands about a complex topic, the more confident they often are in their simple explanations. If you think tariffs are just “taxes on imports that make American products competitive,” you feel very certain about what will happen.
If you understand all the interconnected factors—input costs, retaliation, supply chains, automation trends, skilled labor shortages, capital investment requirements—you realize how complicated it actually is, and you’re less certain about outcomes.
The same with immigration. If you think it’s just “illegal = deport,” you feel very certain. If you understand the decades of non-enforcement, economic dependencies, community integration, employer practices, enforcement capacity constraints, and constitutional protections, you realize why it’s so much harder than it sounds.
But in public debate, confidence wins. The person saying “it’s simple, just impose tariffs” or “just deport them” sounds more credible than the person saying “well, it depends on many factors that interact in complex ways.”
What This Means for All of Us
We’re not just getting wrong answers to policy questions. We’re creating real human suffering through our inability to think systemically.
Manufacturing workers are losing jobs because we imposed tariffs without understanding how global supply chains actually work.
A mother of three is dead and an ICU nurse is dead because we tried to solve a complex immigration problem with aggressive quotas without addressing any of the underlying causes.
And in both cases, we’re doubling down on the simple story rather than learning from what actually happened.
We’re teaching people to solve yesterday’s problems. Memorizing facts and following formulas might have been enough when the world was simpler and changed slowly. But in a world of complex, interconnected systems that change rapidly, we need people who can think systemically.
We’re teaching people to be confident in simple answers when we should be teaching them to be thoughtful about complex ones. The person who says “I’m not sure, there are multiple factors to consider” should get credit, not the one who confidently states the first thing that comes to mind.
We’re teaching subjects when we should be teaching systems. What if instead of isolated history, economics, and civics classes, we taught “how societies work” by showing how economic policies affect social conditions which affect political movements which affect future policies?
Can We Get Better at This?
I don’t have easy answers here. You can’t just “make” people think systemically. It requires:
- Cognitive effort: Holding multiple variables in mind simultaneously is genuinely hard work
- Tolerance for uncertainty: Systems thinking often leads to “it depends” rather than clear answers
- Willingness to be wrong: You have to update your mental models when new information shows they’re incomplete
But here are some things that might help:
Ask “and then what?” When someone proposes a simple solution, don’t argue. Just ask what happens next. And after that. And after that. Help people trace the chain of effects themselves.
If someone says “just deport illegal immigrants,” ask: “And then what happens to the construction projects they’re working on? And the farms they’re harvesting? And their kids who are in school with your kids? And then what?”
If someone says “just impose tariffs,” ask: “And then what do our manufacturers do about their imported components getting more expensive? And what happens when other countries retaliate? And then what?”
Point to historical examples. We’ve tried extreme protectionism before. President Jefferson’s 1807 embargo brought the U.S. to “near-autarkic conditions” with “significant economic costs.” Argentina’s protectionism under Perón in the 1940s created “a domestically oriented industry with high production costs, incapable of competing in international markets” while the country’s exports stagnated.
Acknowledge the real problem. When people support tariffs, they’re usually responding to real pain—lost manufacturing jobs, declining wages, communities that have been gutted. When people support aggressive deportation, they’re responding to real frustration with years of unenforced laws and concerns about border security. That pain and frustration is real. The question isn’t whether we should care about it, but whether the proposed solution will actually help or make things worse.
Model systems thinking. Show your own thought process. “Here’s what I thought at first, but then I learned this, which made me realize I needed to consider this other factor, which changed my conclusion.”
The Bigger Picture
Here’s what worries me: Democracies struggle with complex systems thinking. Voters want simple answers to complex problems. Politicians who explain “it’s complicated and there are tradeoffs” lose to those who promise simple solutions.
I figured out the tariff situation by digging into the data, tracing the effects, connecting the pieces. I saw the Minneapolis shootings coming because the underlying conditions made violent confrontations inevitable. But the winning political messages weren’t complex systems analyses. They were simple stories.
“Tariffs equal jobs.” Three words.
“Deport illegal immigrants.” Three words.
And now we’re watching Americans pay higher prices, lose jobs, and bury their neighbors—all while the same simple stories get repeated because they’re easier to understand than the complex reality.
I don’t know how we fix this at a societal level. But I know it starts with recognizing the problem. We’re using linear thinking tools to solve complex systems problems. It’s like trying to fix a computer with a hammer.
The problems we’re facing—economic disruption, immigration, climate change, healthcare costs, political polarization—they’re all complex systems problems. And we’re not going to solve them by thinking in straight lines.
We need to start teaching ourselves, and especially our kids, how to see the web of connections instead of just the single thread. We need to value thoughtful complexity over confident simplicity. We need to ask “and then what?” until we understand the full chain of effects.
Because the cost of continuing to think in straight lines? It’s measured in lost jobs, lost opportunities, and lost lives.
What do you think? Do you recognize this pattern in how people around you think about problems? Have you found ways to help people see the bigger picture? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.