Future Here Now, July 14, 2022

Coming Soon: Don't take it for granted

Cultural change, technological upheaval and squandered opportunity are nothing new in American history, as this article from Nola.com reinforces. Long before offshoring and labor battles, robotic assembly lines and Work From Home, New Orleans gave us a cautionary tale in assuming that economic forces would remain the same and that the good times would continue to roll.

I didn’t know this story (although there’s echoes of Cincinnati’s history in it as well). But it’s not completely unique. I can show you versions of the same story across the country. And we risk living in many, many more of them, if we don’t learn from past generations’ mistakes in an era where the changes they failed to deal with happen faster and faster than ever.

The author reminds us that New Orleans was one of the most important ports in the world in the early 1800s (and the fourth-largest city in the US at that time), a place where any free person could make substantial money in short order (due in no small …