One of the biggest mistakes people make in trying to interpret economic, political and world events, is viewing things through a functionalist lens.

Whereas a lot of the bad things that happen in the world are always viewed through the lens of intentional design, and agendas that serve specific individuals and institutions, the truth is, a lot of the bad shit that happens in the world are just endemic of simple hubris and miscalculation.

Post hoc reasoning is usually deployed to fit things into a broader narrative, along an ideological worldview and everything bad that happens is seen as a failure of the incumbent power structures and ideologies, everything good that happens is in spite of them, and most importantly, it all validates the ideological and normative claims of critic's own ideology.

Most people do this. Including me. It's hard not to do, because our brain really wants to think about everything in functional terms. The problem is it's often a bad model for explaining complex, emergent phenomena.

Unintended consequences are actually often a much better explanation for most bad things that happen at scale in the world, as opposed to intentional design and nefarious agendas.