Uncertainty and risk largely get written out of history.

From A Crisis of Civilization by the always erudite and insightful Walter Russell Mead. Our blinkered and linear reading of history predisposes us to always forget that in the past, our present was their future and they had no way of seeing how it would turn out. Uncertainty and risk largely get written out of history.

It is all beginning to look very 1890s again: Economic inequality, class struggle, collapse of once stable institutions and employment patterns, financial market instability and recurring currency crises.

125 years ago there was a lot of doubt about what industrial society would look like. The fear that society was dividing irretrievably into classes of haves and have-nots, with the vast majority of humanity toiling in industrial semi-slavery for the benefit of a few was rampant. Some thought this condition could last; many others thought the toiling masses would rise against the haves.

That working class mobilization would decline as the factory workers became better off, moved into the ‘burbs and bought cars, was not on the program, but that is what happened. That the economic storms and privations of the late Victorian period and the global crisis caused by World War I and its aftermath would ultimately give way to decades of stable prosperity did not strike many observers as inevitable or even probable in 1893 or 1921.