History Matters

Hans Rosling points out that you should “never leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.” Incentives matter, and directing resources to where they are most effective matters, but meritocracy is meaningless when you don’t look at privilege. It is like asking how much profit was made without asking how much capital was used. Was the capital borrowed? An awful investment can still make a huge return with lots of leverage. Borrow a mountain of money and use it lazily, it can still make money if it was free to borrow. Saying “History is irrelevant”, we have to move forward, is not meritocracy. It is Hereditary Privilege. As Warren Buffett says, it is “unfair to select the finalists of the 100m olympics based on their parent’s times.” History always matters. Honest history. Releasing the past doesn’t release us. It traps us in goldfish ignorance. Where the only world we know is the contextless world we see right now.