As always Dan, your writing is a pleasure to read.
I make my living as an archivist and researcher of history. There may very well be immutable laws of history, there may be many, but I think we are very far from being able to grasp them and even further away from such laws being very useful. History is everything we are, its big, and you can find examples for everything.
Does history teach us? Of course, its littered with failures to learn from, successes to appreciate and vignettes of the down right weird pointless passages of so many human endeavors. If anything it should teach us some humility. The point is and should always be to examine who you are and what you want to know. Imagining history is a goddess that appears to you with the great secrets is romantic and beautiful but not reality.
History is like a very tidy partner who cleans away all your notes and books and by doing so renders them lost. You have to go looking where they placed them. You must never forget history can give you an answer and an example to draw on, not the answer and the ultimate example to beat all others.
The whole idea Piketty advances is extremely shallow and history-ignorant. He speaks about inequality as something that can be measured by one's bank account balance. But inequality you have to measure by completely other things like life expectancy differences, literacy, access to electricity and appliances, access to information, size of houses, ability to travel abroad. Piketty speaks about inequality in a period when every true way to measure inequality shows that everyone has a way better standard of life.
As always Dan, your writing is a pleasure to read.
I make my living as an archivist and researcher of history. There may very well be immutable laws of history, there may be many, but I think we are very far from being able to grasp them and even further away from such laws being very useful. History is everything we are, its big, and you can find examples for everything.
Does history teach us? Of course, its littered with failures to learn from, successes to appreciate and vignettes of the down right weird pointless passages of so many human endeavors. If anything it should teach us some humility. The point is and should always be to examine who you are and what you want to know. Imagining history is a goddess that appears to you with the great secrets is romantic and beautiful but not reality.
History is like a very tidy partner who cleans away all your notes and books and by doing so renders them lost. You have to go looking where they placed them. You must never forget history can give you an answer and an example to draw on, not the answer and the ultimate example to beat all others.
The whole idea Piketty advances is extremely shallow and history-ignorant. He speaks about inequality as something that can be measured by one's bank account balance. But inequality you have to measure by completely other things like life expectancy differences, literacy, access to electricity and appliances, access to information, size of houses, ability to travel abroad. Piketty speaks about inequality in a period when every true way to measure inequality shows that everyone has a way better standard of life.