The Past as the Present

I'm reading JK Galbraith's "A History of Economics", the only author of set texts from my undergraduate school I still want to read avidly.
Amazingly prescient (even if it is over 20 years old) to our current economic predicament because the 1% (and their apologist politicians and clergymen) never learn from the past but are only interested in justifying their privileged position. It's only been a recent phenomenon that bankers have become a respected profession - as they always used to be regarded as part of the dodgy middlemen, shysters and usurers in the past - and perhaps that has been our mistake to allow one of them now to be our Prime Minister.