Let The Good Times Toll

 Both Krugman and HCR establish a philosophical premise that this space has made before: We don't know how good we've got it - historically speaking. Nostalgia is a lazy intellectual practice; it lacks rigorous examination of actual evidence. My youth was spent in a time of ubiquitous cigarette smoke, leaded gasoline, acid rain, stagflation followed by the misery of Reaganomics. The world was undeniably less kind, a fact that has enraged MAGAts.

The other night I was re-watching Broadcast News and it was fascinating to see the same criticisms of new media being made in 1987 as were being made by Network in 1976 as are being made today. We imagine some past where things were better because we naturally forget the mundane and tedious problems that filled our waking day.

Krugman and Richardson note that we forget the hard lessons of the past. Krugman talks about the Minksy Cycle of "irrational exuberance" that leads to financial crises. Basically, we emerged from 2008 sobered by the vulnerability and recklessness of Wall Street and so we put in place reforms and Wall Street itself sobered up. As the memory of that moment fades, a new generation of reckless finance bros will push the envelope of what is prudent or even ethical. You then get a bubble and institutional FOMO. 

I was watching Dumb Money, the movie about the GameStop stock bubble, and what struck me was that the movie had a broad populist message about how hedge fund guys suck. That is true. They do suck, especially the vulture capitalists who come in a destroy companies for profit. At the same time, GameStop was a bad company, and some of those who speculated on it got burned for reasons that were incredibly preventable.

Richardson applies this lesson to the "postwar liberal order" and even vaccines that MAGA appears hellbent on destroying. We have benefitted for so long from being the guarantor of Pax Americana that we don't even have living memories of the belligerent chaos that preceded it. We take herd immunity for granted because we don't remember measles or, Dog forbid, polio.

Essentially comfortable times - but times we perceive as "bad" - means that we can elect a reality TV star and then re-elect him after his 34 felony convictions. We become an unserious people. We invest in GameStop "stonks". We throw tantrums over public health measures. We spit and sputter over putting pronouns in our email signatures. 

Reality, however, gets the last word. Jamelle Bouie said something along the lines of "Our public health decisions appear to be being made by sentient salmonella and measles viruses." Bird flu doesn't care if you hide the true data on its spread. Bird flu doesn't care about anything. It's a virus; it just wants to replicate.  Markets will not ignore the crazed worthlessness of crypto forever. 

In the end, hollowing out our governing institutions will come with a reckoning, and perhaps then a few generations will learn the lessons of hard times.