Excellent post. I haven’t read the book. Must put it on my list…. The second point you make about scapegoats is important. People who can’t admit they are beyond the limits of their own control will always blame someone else.
And an eye opener to me in the last few years is how ‘relative’ inflation is. The political class only ever talk about aggregate measures - where the reality is that inflation on some items is worse than on others, so it punishes members of society unfairly.