Tyler Cowen: Why Do We Refuse To Learn From History?

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Tyler Cowen next to books with a red arrow pointing at them. The words 'The Great Forgetting' are in red and black in the upper right corner, the Just Asking Questions logo is in the lower left corner, and the Reason logo is in the upper left corner | Graphic by John Osterhoudt

Why are we forgetting history’s lessons?

We’re told in school that we study history so as not to repeat its mistakes. But what if those lessons aren’t sticking? Today’s guest regularly invokes what he calls The Great Forgetting. The striking thing about this collective amnesia is that it doesn’t apply only to distant, ancient history, but hard lessons learned only a few decades ago—lessons about inflation, price controls, and crime.

Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Director of the Mercatus Center, and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He and his colleague Alex Tabbarok founded the popular and influential economics blog Marginal Revolution and recently launched their joint show, the Marginal Revolution Podcast, which has released a limited series on the unlearned economic and cultural lessons of the 1970s.

The post Tyler Cowen: Why Do We Refuse To Learn From History? appeared first on Reason.com.

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