On the map

At the centre History does not repeat itself, but patterns of human behaviour do, and what always follows an economic crisis is political upheaval. Holds JHJames Holland Read this korrent →

• Similar wording Market history teaches why things behave as they do, never what happens next, because the details never repeat. Holds MHMorgan Housel
• Similar wording A mass death does not by itself produce a boom afterwards: expecting a pandemic to renew an economy on its own misreads what followed the Black Death. Holds APAda Palmer
• Similar wording History has no predetermined path: its course turns on unpredictable contingencies rather than on deep currents that would have produced the same outcome anyway. Holds BDBret Devereaux
• Similar wording History has a reproducibility problem worse than science’s replication crisis, because hardly anyone ever goes back to the sources to check what a historian claimed they say. Holds AHAnton Howes
• Similar wording Europe's crises were predictable and overdetermined, not the unforeseeable shocks that the 'return of history' story makes of them. Holds ATAdam Tooze
• Similar wording Economic development happened once in each country, which is why the big theories of why nations get rich cannot be tested. Holds NSNoah Smith
• Similar wording History teaches complexity rather than prediction: it can explain the mechanisms of change without licensing any claim about what comes next. Holds APAda Palmer
• Similar wording The hardest thing for a future historian to recover will be how little the world outside understood, because whatever happened looks inevitable in retrospect. Holds DADario Amodei