I work for a government agency in Belgium.
If Donald Trump signs a paper that Microsoft and its subsiduaries cannot provide services to us because of sanctions, my agency will not recover. Complete shutdown and rebuild from scratch as if we never existed.

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.
The economy (and the world in general) is not as simple as A causes B because A en B happen together.

Since 2008 the advent of inflation caused by low fed intrest rates has been announced.
In 2021 high inflation arrived.
In 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 high inflation did not happen with low intrest rates.

Some elements that do drive inflation?
1) supply disruption: supply chain problems, economic warfare, shift in economic ties, opioid crisis and unhealthy workforce, shrinking labor force, uneducated workforce
2) profit maximisation through extreme unhindered pricing power (=there is no real competitive market anymore in lots of products and services. And companies in the end allways try to achieve extreme pricing power so its a natural evolution for all markets)
3) healthy demand for goods and services. People have money.

How do you lower inflation?
You can solve some of the drivers of inflation. That takes institutional changes. That's not going to happen in the short term, if at all.
You can raise intrest rates to cool the economy in general. Higher intrest rates can cool the economy and has as byproduct the expectation of lower inflation. Other byproducts of high intrest rates: lower wages, unemployment, lower stock valuations, ...

Inflation is hurting so much for workers because unlike other economic actors, workers generally seem to have no pricing power. Most workers cannot disappear from the market if they are not happy with wages. Workers generally are price takers. The workers are now arriving at pricing power (because of full employment). So action is being taken to rein in their pricing power because its easy. Workers are the ones you can screw the easiest, so they get screwed. Just sit still and hope for the best.

I also see a trend that people look for correlations, find correlations and then draw some conclusion without any proof of causation. To me it strikes me most for economics. Public policy is set based on those correlations.

It is very counterintuÃtive but correlation research means nothing, especially in economics. Correlation research would be an amusing way to spend your time and get to know some variables, but correlation research is being used to inflence people. Repeat after me: correlation means nothing. If you find a correlation luck has hit you. Or luck has been manipulated to serve some point. Correlation means nothing whatsoever. Articles describing correlation are a waist of your time. You should not act based on correlation research.

Now if you take big datasets with lots of variables and you test correlations between those variables, you will find strong correlations. Correlation here, correlation there, correlation everywhere. If you do millions of tests en tweak your parameters, correlation is all yours.

But luckily now you know: correlation has no pratical use in your live.

Data mining is indeed a very mediocre scientific activity. Correlation on itself means nothing at all. If you want to proof something the correlation should be 100% and you should be able to explain why the correlation exists and replicate it in controlled experiments. The problem is that those slam dunk scientific discoveries are all or mostly allready found. And nowadays the poor scientists need to find something to bolster their path to glory.

Good science could be: find a correlation an proof the causality. But a lot of studies stop at the correlation. That's what fills newspapers nowadays. 'You get fat from diet coke since most people that drink diet coke are fat'.

Some scientist try to eliminate all other reasons and then decide that their causality is the only one that explains the correlation. But in effect they say: those things correlate and I 'the superintelligent scientist with multiple PhD's' cannot find another explanation and that is why my explanation must be true.

For background you should listen regularly to 'more or less: behind the stats' http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
You can listen to podcasts that are interesting and fun to listen to. And some of the older ones are absolutely great. They gave me great insight in the workings of media (and science).

The only downside is that if your girlfriend tells you something she heard on the radio and you answer her: correlation is not causality, she gets upset.

I (have to) use Outlook 2010 and this version of Outlook finally has a decent search function. Almost as good as the Lookout plugin I used to use in Outlook 2003.