I miss the simple and sweet 1990s

I remember the 1990s pretty well, so I never thought they had much chance of becoming yet another “good old days”. Then I read this opening graf, from the lead story in the NYT Week in Review:

Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our union is stumped.

The Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguably the toughest problems we’ve confronted in decades, are nothing if not spectacularly complicated.

Seriously? Were the wars in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda less complicated than those in Iraq and Afghanistan? No doubt, the US has taken much more responsibility for the latter two, but no one who was paying attention in the 1990s would think that we’ve entered into a new age of military complexity.

When it comes to finance, I’m no expert. But I certainly remember extensive discussions from the 1990s about the amazing new complexity of our globalized world. Remember Long Term Capital Management and how it threatened our whole financial system? How about the financial crisis that swept East Asia in the late 1990s?

I admit it. I can’t stand the good old days. It’s a brand of intellectual laziness that can have serious consequences. For example, the US military was only able to turn around the situation in Iraq by understanding insurgency as a very traditional form of warfare and learning from the experience of past counterinsrugents.

Of course, the good old days are seductive. Who wouldn’t want to escape into an imaginary past?