Why do we refuse to learn from history? | Tyler Cowen

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. And 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 and Director of the Mercatus Center and host of the great podcast Conversations with Tyler. He and his colleague Alex Tabbarok founded the popular and influential economics blog Marginal Revolution and recently launched their own joint show, the Marginal Revolution Podcast, which recently released a limited series on the unlearned economic and cultural lessons of the 1970s.