Nationalism Is the One Bias Markets Will Never Forgive
I’ve never met a nationalist who could honestly call himself rational.
Think about it like this: you love your kids. You love your spouse. That bias is baked in — beautiful, necessary, human. But you can still run a spreadsheet on your family’s without pretending your toddler is a genius.
You detach.
You analyse.
Markets don’t let you do that.
Your culture, your nation, your “people” those aren’t separate from your economic lens.
They are the lens.
The food you grew up eating that quietly accelerates your health risks.
The work ethic your grandparents drilled into you that works in one era and backfires in the next.
You can’t step outside it any more than you can step outside your own shadow.
Multiculturalism’s fatal flaw is pretending this doesn’t matter.
It tells us all cultures are equal, that no hierarchy of ideas exists.
Some cultural bundles of habits, time-preferences, risk tolerances, and truth-seeking norms compound faster than others.
They get you to objective reality quicker. Others don’t. Markets don’t grade on a curve; they grade on results.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth most nationalists dodge: if you can’t fully disown your culture — even for the two seconds it takes to price an asset — then that attachment is already your largest single bias.
Full stop.
Now, the Pareto escape hatch.
Western cultural software (property rights, rule of law, deferred gratification, open inquiry) currently owns roughly 80 % of the global economic and market pie. So a Western-leaning bias, even if it’s not pure objectivity, still gets you 80 % of the way there without much effort. That’s why a mildly patriotic Western investor can still outperform for decades — the tailwind is structural.
Flip to the Eastern side and the picture changes.
Adaptation, harmony, long term patience, state-guided capital allocation those traits shine in certain cycles.
But history shows Eastern equity markets (Japan 1989, China post-2010 stimulus cycles, every tiger economy that overheated) go through violent mean-reversion swings.
The onus is on anyone pushing “Eastern exceptionalism in stocks” to prove the cycle has finally been broken. So far, price has not cooperated.
Bottom line: nationalism isn’t patriotism.
It’s the quiet conviction that “my people’s way” is the default setting for reality.
That conviction feels warm. It feels loyal. It feels like boots on the ground.