Past Sins?

People evolve over time.  Depending on how old you are, you have likely held various beliefs and opinions in the past that now seem wrong.

Rightly or wrongly when I was growing up in the Bronx we used to use words related to nationality that are now considered inappropriate.  They may have been pejorative, but they were generally used as descriptive.

Similarly many of us were raised to believe certain behaviors, now accepted were sins and illegal.  It wasn't something you formed an opinion on, it was simply what it was.  You may have wondered why but it wasn't something that was an issue until later.

Was it wrong?  From today's perspective it is but people were arrested for things back then that we wouldn't even blink at today.

I was reading an article today which talked about how the rail industry, itself an environmentally friendly form of transport, defended coal which it makes a lot of money transporting back in the 90s and to some extent later.

Was this wrong of them?  This article implies or states it was, but the railroads defended an item which was, and still is, a major customer to them.  Yes we knew a lot about carbon pollution back then, but it wasn't the consensus it is today.

Should people be condemned for positions they took at a time when that position was either the consensus position or at least a position you could honestly hold?

They might be demonstrably wrong using what we know today, but as they say 20-20 hindsight is easy.

I see a lot of people criticized for things they could have known or should have known but which at the time they didn't know.

The past isn't always relevant, it just isn't.

Moving Forward!

There are some things that are truths but which some people don't want to admit.

For example, progress, while benefitting most people doesn't benefit all.

For most improvements in history there were winners and losers.

Generally the winners outnumbered the losers, but if you were a loser, that's not much consolation.

I'm not being complex here, we used to have elevators that required operators, now they don't, no more elevator operators.

There is a long list of jobs we no longer need, and in most cases the people who lost those jobs simply had to move on.

Sometimes the changes are more dramatic than others.

As farming was transformed with the introduction of tractors and other equipment that could replace field workers we saw a migration from farm to city. It was disruptive but in a generation is was absorbed.

We have seen a similar disruption in manufacturing as robotics and international trade has eliminated many high paying low skill manufacturing jobs.

The adjustment is ongoing and mitigated somewhat by our demographics.

However it isn't going to revert to what it was.  It has to become something new.

What will that be?  Well predictions of that sort are generally wrong because we don't know what we don't know.

We just need to move forward and be ready to meet the challenges.