Top Highlights

• The fires of 1910 similarly altered the country’s attitude toward natural disaster. Up until then settlers had emulated the Indians who had occupied the land before them and used fire to clear land for grazing. But the early twentieth century saw a shift in attitudes toward natural resources. The logging industry wanted the trees for lumber; Theodo...
• Gifford Pinchot, a confidant of Roosevelt and the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, wrote a few months after the fires: “Today we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of men.… The first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon.” Fighting fire, he argued, was essential to economic progress: “Conservati...
• Between them, Fisher and Keynes provided an intellectual framework through which government could steer an economy away from both booms and depressions. Politically, the time was ripe; the economic devastation of the Great Depression made the public more amenable to activist government. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t just expand the government’s respons...
• Minsky thought engineers’ efforts to control the economy would ultimately be self-defeating because they assumed that the next threat to the economy would look like the last one. Because of innovation, this would never be the case. By enacting policies aimed at restricting the growth of credit by banks, they would fail to see how it was migrating o...