Will Wilkinson responds to Ross Douthat:

In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.

The phrase “easy to imagine” has all the virtues of theft over honest toil. It is “easy to imagine” that the Kaiser won the Great War and that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet). Likewise, it is easy to imagine Jacob Hacker’s now–largely–discredited thesis of income volatility and  our current cyclical financial worries defining domestic politics in a generation, but why would we bother to imagine it? Let’s imagine instead the centrality of the coming “robot gap” in American politics.

Do we over or underestimate the probability of scenarios that are "easy to imagine"?