Pat present:
One of the interesting—and scary—parts of studying history is seeing how it repeats itself. Like book publishing, everything is cyclical. I fear that the current concentration on the basics like math and science is depriving students of the opportunity to learn from the experience of others. There’s no bigger proof of that than today’s economy! For students of history, the current situation was obvious a decade ago.
PBS has an excellent summary of various economic bubbles in the past, but take a look at the one about 1929 and see if that doesn’t sound exactly like our recent world-wide binge of greed: expansion of credit, reckless purchasing, stock market speculation…. It’s all there in black and white, an outline of how not to do it. And we did it anyway.
And a true student of history could trace even further back to the monopolies at the turn of the twentieth century, which we replicated in the nineties when all the book publishers and banks and other industries started buying each other out. Since this isn’t a blog about finance, I won’t bore you with the details of the results of that mentality. You can watch the TV news and see it for yourself.
What makes people ignore history? Do we think we’re so superior to our ancestors that we would never make the same mistakes? Or have we all become so busy that we don’t take time to think about what we’re actually doing? Is there something in our own lives that we could or should change to prevent making the mistakes of the past—ours or someone else’s? There could be entire stories hiding in such possibilities!