“This time, it’s different.” You’ve probably heard some version of this lately. AI is going to eliminate jobs. Automation will make human workers obsolete. Unlike all those previous technological shifts, this one will actually leave people with nowhere to go. Except people have been saying “this time, it’s different” for centuries. And they’ve always been wrong. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder tells a remarkable story. A glassmaker came before Emperor Augustus with an invention—flexible glass that could be hammered back into shape after being dented or dropped. He demonstrated this “vitrum flexile” by throwing it on the floor before …

In our last post, we explored how the 2008 financial crisis happened because policymakers thought they could manage the economy like a machine—setting interest rates, guiding lending, engineering outcomes. They couldn’t. The knowledge problem meant they were making decisions based on information they simply didn’t have and couldn’t have. But there’s another piece to this puzzle, one that’s just as important for understanding what went wrong: moral hazard. The term sounds technical, but the concept is straightforward. Moral hazard happens when someone gets to make decisions but doesn’t have to live with the full consequences of those decisions. When the …

“If we could just get the right people in charge, we could fix this.” It’s tempting, isn’t it? When the economy tanks and people lose their jobs and homes, wouldn’t it be better if smart, well-intentioned experts could just… manage things? Set the right interest rates, guide money to the right places, make sure loans go to people who can actually pay them back, stop bubbles before they get too big? This idea—that economies work like machines you can tune and adjust—shaped pretty much every decision that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There’s just one problem: economies aren’t machines. …

In our last post, we explored how the Great Depression didn’t happen because capitalism failed, but because government intervention in monetary markets created distortions that made a necessary correction catastrophic. But the story doesn’t end with the 1929 crash. What followed reveals an even more important lesson about how government solutions can turn a temporary downturn into a decade-long disaster. Most of us learned in school that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs softened the Depression’s worst effects, and that World War II’s massive government spending finally ended the economic nightmare. It’s a comforting narrative that positions the government as the …