The Price of Forgetting:How Economic Systems Become Machines of Amnesia, and What It Would Take to Make Them Remember

I. The Architecture of Harm What is the half-life of an injustice? There are harms that vanish quickly. A harsh word. A missed opportunity. And then there are those that remain—silent, heavy, sedimentary. A toxin in a riverbed. A contract inked in coercion. A debt inherited, not earned. These are the harms that don’t just linger; they propagate. Law, at its best, tries to trace these damages across generations. Legal precedent functions as institutional memory. But our economic systems, by contrast, are designed with the opposite impulse: erasure. The market does not remember. It prices, it optimizes, it forgets. It forgets who owned the land before it was mined. It forgets who breathed the air before it was fouled. It forgets what was sacrificed to generate the surplus. Justice, in a system that forgets, becomes a question not of morality, but of scale. If you extract fast enough, big enough, long enough—what you destroy may never be accounted for. II. Economic Amnesia as a D...