No one knows the future, but we do know that it will have some shocks in store for us. We can imagine those shocks to be exogenous, and design mechanisms to compensate for them, such as well-conceived welfare states. Or, we can view them as endogenous, always and everywhere the result of our own bad policy choices. If we take the latter view, and we do not know what the future may have in store, as well as take policy tools away from democratically elected politicians, we may want to try to make the future conform to our preferences.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 253