Summary

Nothing that’s happened had to happen, or must happen again. That’s why historians aren’t prophets. Wars, booms, busts, inventions, breakthroughs – none of those things were inevitable. They happened, and they’ll keep happening in various forms. But specific events that shape history are always low-probability events. Their surprise is what causes them to leave a mark. And they were surprising specifically because they weren’t inevitable. A lot of things have to go right (or wrong) to move the needle in what is an otherwise random swarm of eight billion people on earth just trying to make it through the day. The problem when studying historical events is that you know how the story ends, and it’s impossible to un-remember what you know today when thinking about the past. It’s hard to imagine alternative paths of history when the actual path is already known. So things always look more inevitable than they were. Now let me tell you a story about the Great Depression. “After booms come busts,” is about as close to...