Das Gesetz der Verschlechtigung aller Dinge (The Law of the Deterioration of Everything)

I’ve been reading and rereading Charles Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises to better understand why we do what we do to our economies. The short answer is: we do what we do to our economies because that’s what we always do to our economies. I’m not being cryptic either. Over the past several centuries, we have gone manic, bubbled, panicked, and crashed our economies repeatedly. We never learn. So here is my incomplete, half-assed, non-chronologic list of things we never learned from.