Read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Gotta love a psychologist that stole the Nobel Prize in economics from the economists.

Don't underestimate the role of collective human idiocy in capitalism's outcomes. How do I know? I've been dumb money as well as smart money.

With or without the USSR Clinton was going to be a beta president, a consolidator and triangulator of the Reagan alpha presidency, just as Eisenhower and Nixon were the same with respect to the transformative FDR New Deal and WWII presidency.