The Case For Studying History
I know that for many folks today, history seems increasingly irrelevant. Millenials will say that anything a bunch of old white guys were doing 500 years ago has no bearing on their lives. Or perhaps more accurately, they don't want it to have any bearing on their life.
I love history in and of itself, but studying it has real value in understanding public policy choices. The problem in public policy is that we can seldom run good controlled studies (e.g. half of you will live under socialism and half capitalism and we will see who does better). And even when we do inadvertently run A/B tests (e.g. blue state fiscal and regulatory model vs red state) we seldom pay attention to the results in part because we are just too close to them and too invested in them in one way or another.
But if you look back through enough time and across enough different civilizations, humans have already run millions of experiments and we can read the results. I find it impossible, for example, to look at our government today without thinking of Rome and the Gracchi brothers in the 2nd century BC. People today are trying to throw out institutional checks and balances, rules of decorum, traditions of collegiality, and limitations on power because they feel these are standing in the way of (mostly) well-meaning improvement programs ( in areas such as climate, income inequality, racism, etc). But history teaches that such efforts always end the same way. As in Rome in 133BC or Russian in 1917 or Cuba in 1957 or in many other historical cases, the inroads made by well-meaning idealists in weakening limits on individual power just open the door for real iron-fisted authoritarians to take the helm.
