“Who controls the past now, controls the future. Who controls the present now, controls the past.”
That is from “Testify,” a song by newly minted rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famers Rage against the Machine. I don’t know if Phillip W. Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research is fan enough to be familiar with that, but I bet he knows the original source: George Orwell’s 1984.
Whether or not it informed a recent study he coauthored is unclear, but that line has been ringing in my head ever since I read Magness’s summary.
Magness, along with Jeremy Horpedahl and Marcus Witcher, professors of economics and history respectively at the University of Central Arkansas, discovered differences between how college-level introductory economics and history textbooks

My oldest turned seventeen last month. To commemorate the occasion, she and I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’d taken her to her first (allegedly) rated-R movie a couple years ago to see the quite good Baby Driver, but this was Tarantino.
Brad Pitt won an Oscar for portraying Cliff Booth, the personal stuntman for Leonardo DiCaprio’s struggling actor Rick Dalton. Early on, Cliff consoles Rick after Rick interprets a dinner meeting as a signal that he is officially a “has-been.” The next morning, as he’s dropping Rick off on set, Cliff reassures him that “you’re Rick [expletive] Dalton. Don’t you forget it.”
I turned to my daughter and said “(Rick)’s his meal ticket,” to which she responded “Huh?”
The coronavirus scare has laid bare the tradeoffs