Editing Friedman's Thermostat (section)

== Examples ==

Typical examples of this come from economics and the Fed's influence on inflation and prices. This makes sense due to the origin of the term. But the concept itself is not so limited. While the original speaks about economists misunderstanding inflation, this misapprehension of cause and effect is common in other spheres among laymen as well.

{{Quote
|text=“The math isn’t mathing, right?” Armstrong said. “If incarceration was the thing that made people safe, we would be the safest state in the country.”
|source=Andrea Armstrong, Loyola University<ref name=prison-nbc/>
}}

{{Quote
|text=If incarceration worked to secure safety, we would be the safest nation in all of human history.
|source=Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon<ref name=prison-dn/>
}}

As we have observed in San Francisco, as crime rate increases, politicians are placed under pressure to increase enforcement, increase prosecution, and increase judgment. Consequently, enforcement C aims to preserve some rate of crime O, while encountering variations in crime due to external causes like sudden unemployment, masking, etc. V.

One I could imagine being similar could be a belief that places with heavier lockdowns during the first few years of the COVID-19 had the same rate of deaths as those with softer lockdowns. Presumably, health authorities could be reacting to high death-rate with heavier lockdowns because of some other underlying variation (one place having more elderly or disease-vulnerable or so on). However, I didn't search too hard for whether this belief was widespread or whether it was unjustified (both necessary for it to be a Friedman Thermostat belief) and so we must leave it unquoted.