Applied history has been tied almost exclusively to issues of national policy and decision-making in the public sphere. We can attribute (or blame) the field’s founders, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, for this narrow-sightedness. In their preface to Thinking in Time, the seminal methodological blueprint for the nascent field, Neustadt and May have a singular audience in mind: “those who govern—or hope to do so… men and women elected or appointed to public office.” As these towering figures graced the plebeian world with their insights into how everyday people could and should wield historical analysis, they also (perhaps unintentionally) handcuffed those “Uses of History” to the problems that loomed over a select cadre of like-minded and like-educated elites. But the central principles of applied history—that the skills developed by historians to interpret the past and to read meaning into the past to solve present-day problems—ought to be democratized and practiced by all segments of society. In short, we need to bring applied history from the war room to the boardroom and the dining room. 

Part of what makes a democratized applied history necessary has been the success of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s in shaping where and how major decisions have been made. Decades of deregulation and the politics of privatization mean that, to some extent, the most consequential decisions regarding the health and composition of our economy transcend the Beltway. Economic power has diffused across the corporate landscape, from centers of political power (i.e. Washington, D.C.) to centers of financial power (e.g. New York, Chicago, or Atlanta). This is not to make a value judgment on neoliberalism, but we historians must recognize that neoliberalism has won, for better or worse. For some, like historian Gary Gerstle, that order has come and gone, but that still means that the world has been remade in its image. And we must work with what pieces remain.

In these new spaces of power, individuals and groups do use history to inform their private decisions. But how they use history leaves much to be desired. And so, while Neustadt and May’s deep read and modeling of key moments in US foreign policy may shine a light on the best practices in that specific domain, their survey reads a bit incomplete in the twenty-first century; and the lessons appear to hit a natural barrier in terms of transferability. Although I can’t offer a comprehensive guide for how personal planners and wealth managers ought to use history, the following survey of contemporary practices reveals that their present models are inadequate and have—and though I may jump to a logical conclusion, I do not say this lightly—led to the rapid deterioration of the liberal political economy that has sustained trade and exchange in this country for at least eight decades.

Using the Past in Personal Planning

Since the beginning of the United States’s Middle Eastern bombing campaign and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the economy has been through something of a whirlwind. Between February 28 and March 30, the S&P 500 dipped 537.90 points (7.82% drop); the NASDAQ Composite dipped 1,873.57 points (8.27% drop); the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 3,688.64 (7.54% drop); and the Russell 2000 dipped 241.93 points (9.11% drop). Clearly, the markets have been responding poorly to the threat of a future in which oil—the vital resource for transporting goods and facilitating exchange in this global economy (especially as the Trump administration doggedly seeks to perpetuate the fossil-fuel economy)—will stop flowing so freely. Market volatility is for younger investors and old-fashioned speculators the road to an easy buck, but it can spell doom for those approaching retirement. 

And yet, walk into any financial advisor’s office, and they will point to wisdom earned from their Chief Investment Offices: stay invested. The markets appear to bear out this suggestion. Trump’s hasty action in Iran is only the latest episode in the market’s difficult relationship with the right-wing populist’s penchant for making decisions seemingly on a whim. Though these indices have fallen in response to the announcement of Liberation Day, the assault on practically the entire federal administrative apparatus, and the rejection of efforts to compromise with Democratic lawmakers, the markets remain resilient. Since January 20, 2025, the S&P 500 has gained 820.23 points (13.68%); the NASDAQ Composite has gained 5,172.03 points (26.35%); the Dow Jones has gained 4,428.74 points (10.18%); and the Russell 2000 has gained 354.71 points (15.59%). Also leading the charge is the Wall Street Journal, which has reliably touted the perceived wisdom no fewer than four times since the beginning of the Trump age: once in his first term in 2017, once after the shock of the Liberation Day tariffs subsided in late 2025, and twice so far this year before and after the assault on Iran commenced.

In part, this resilience is sustained by investors’ faith in the long-term growth of the stock market. The favorite mantra of these financial intermediaries is that “time in the market outperforms timing the market.” And so, despite their customers’ fears of the health of the economy, they advise that they should stay invested; although, they may diversify their holdings, not only in sector allocations but also in asset classes, to ease riding the waves. Investment management firms like Northwestern Mutual and Capital Group beat this drum to their customers, pointing to history as a lodestar for dictating their optimal behavior set. 

Volatility is normal, these finance gurus say, and we should not react emotionally to momentary dips. In their February 2024 Market Commentary, Northwestern Mutual suggests, “There will always be a seemingly compelling reason to sell out of the market, or to try to time your entry point back into stocks, but history has shown that investors who have stayed invested have been rewarded.” Capital Group’s literature also proclaims, the perseverance of hypothetical investors who stayed the course for the twenty years between 2005 and 2024 “helped improve the chances that they would come out ahead… history has shown that positive outcomes occur much more often over longer periods than shorter ones.” Application of historical insight clearly produces returns—or has the capacity to realize returns—but these firms apply it incompletely.

True, history does offer a specific fix to a perspectival problem that plagues so much of the social sciences, including economics, and broader society. Jo Guldi and David Armitage call it short-termism. Consistently referencing the past is a surefire way to resolve the short-termism that would otherwise provoke us to make rash decisions. However, wealth managers’ application of the long-term view is faulty. In part, they confuse the descriptive with the prescriptive. Yes, markets have rebounded in the past, and an hypothetical person who has dollar-cost-averaged steadily and reliably since the 1970s would have seen tremendous gains in their portfolio by 2020. However, what these analysts get wrong—or what they neglect to account—is the other central dogma of the historical discipline: contingency.

Contingency means that you cannot directly compare one historical period to another, or to the present moment. No two economic situations are perfectly alike, so you cannot presume that the market will rebound as it had in the past. History and time are not mechanical constructs that operate on a logic that humans can translate so easily. I must concede, sure, stay invested and look out for your long-term outcomes: that much is sound advice. To avoid thinking in the short-term, we mustn’t discourage curing our societal myopia. But we should not treat history as some positivistic exercise that tells us to act one way or another simply because that’s how some hypothetical person would have responded in the past to a specific set of circumstances. Therefore, while officers might arrive at a fine conclusion, their path to wisdom leaves much to be desired. 

Estate Planning and the Rise of the New Individualism

Beyond investment management, I’ve also noticed history has popped up in estate planning: in questions of how wealth can be transferred from one generation to the next and how to ensure it isn’t squandered away within twenty years. In what appears to be a self-published self-help guide for financial peace, Garrett Gunderson applies history to teach his readers how to keep their wealth in the family. To make his case, he opens with a direct comparison of Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Rockefeller, imploring us to take lessons from the past. Whereas the Vanderbilt fortune was spent away within fifty years of the death of the railroad tycoon, Rockefeller’s wealth has managed to survive six generations. The “Rockefeller Method” involves creating labyrinthine trusts that prevents theft from the tax man, opportunistic lawyers, and wicked (or merely incompetent) heirs. 

Here again, we see a poor application of historical insight. Most of Gunderson’s readers—certainly, most people in the world—could not compare their own financial realities to that of either the Vanderbilts or Rockefellers. And if they can compare, I can almost guarantee that the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk rely less on the earned wisdom of Mr. Gunderson and more on their own fiduciaries. So even using the analogy method, which Neustadt and May themselves qualify in the first chapter of their book, the history here falls intellectually flat. 

Of course, What Would the Rockefellers Do is not a genuine article of applied history; that guise fades away once we fly past the frame in the introductory chapter. The rest of the book is simply a testament to the benefits of cash flow insurance strategies and general challenges to the financial-advice industry presently championed by Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman. And I freely admit that I am not so well-versed in the peculiar mechanics of term life insurance versus permanent or the merits of revocable trusts and their irrevocable counterparts to give advice on either; I also don’t pretend to do so, thankfully. 

What is truly insightful in Gunderson’s book, however, is the representation of what I can only describe as the rise of a new individualism. The individualism here is new, because the individual has long been heralded as the central archetype in the political philosophy of liberalism. Individualism has been a strong rhetorical tool since John Locke synthesized his political philosophy in the seventeenth century. But what makes this new brand of individualism especially potent in the 2020s—really, since the 1970s—has been this inclination to view the individual as the only useful unit of political economy. Layered beneath Gunderson’s text, though it makes appearances on occasion, is the way neoliberalism has pitted the individual against the community, or government. 

To preserve our wealth, we must hide it from the tax collectors. The value statement hidden beneath this investment philosophy is a sort of libertarianism that eschews any of the benefits of paying into taxes. Though we might be loath to pay taxes when they are spent injudiciously—terrorizing girls’ schools halfway across the world or disproportionately imprisoning Black men for petty crimes, for instance—federal and state monies fund vital social programs: schools, libraries, roads, healthcare for disadvantaged or senior citizens, law enforcement. Everyone might have their own reasons they hesitate to send their hard-earned money to the state, but I’d say it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the state cannot repair its roads, educate its working class, prevent vandals from destroying private property, it ultimately won’t matter how much you save with the Rockefeller Method. 

Lessons in Stock Market Resilience

The misapplication of history also has led, perhaps indirectly, to the recent collapse of our liberal democracy under Trump 2.0. Trump’s unique brand of political nihilism has led to disastrous policy decisions, in part because he isn’t a career politician. He demonstrates very little of the conventional allegiance that politicos have historically privileged. Although he revels in the power of his populist movement and often likens himself to a deity, Trump is less Jupiterian and more Saturnian, willing to consume any of his loyalist children who stand ready to defy his will (or, at least, cause the least bit headache). Just ask Marjorie, Kristi, or Pam. And his cavalier decision to send Vance to Islamabad to broker a peace with the Iranians or to stoke a pointless crusade against the Catholic Church (again, seemingly to humiliate the heir to this political movement) reveals a blindness to the long-term viability of his political movement. He is intent to collapse Trumpism, for there can be no Trumpism without Trump. 

Say what you will about the man, Trump is a businessman, and the only metric for which he’s demonstrated any sense of caution has been the performance of the stock market. Gone are the days of the Fireside Chats and public addresses of the twentieth century, and we must behold a new medium: Truth Social. There on that auspicious platform, you’ll find not only Trump’s tirades against his supposed allies and definite opponents, but we also see admonitions to buy, buy, BUY! One week after the formal declaration of Liberation Day on April 2, as the market collapsed into a major slump and just before announcing temporary relief from the tariffs, Trump announced, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”

Kinetic action in Iran has also seemed to confuse politicos wondering whether the United States is nearing a stable, reliable peace in the Middle East. But the war is not being waged with a firm, concrete timeline or end goal. During trading days, Trump and his intermediaries announce that the United States is negotiating fantastically favorable deals in which Iran has agreed to an infinite number of regime changes, total end to its nuclear programs, and complete demilitarization. Pay attention to the markets, and you’ll see that each week sees rising market performance before crashing down to reality as Hegseth announces new strikes on the country’s civilian infrastructure. This is not the grand strategy of a politician but the machinations of a businessperson who has leveraged the most powerful office in the world for his own and his friends’ personal gains. 

The market does appear to expand. In part, expansion comes from this “historically inflected” wisdom that has pervaded the minds and perspectives of most people with investment portfolios. But the growth is also due in part to the fact that a growing number of people and families who do invest regularly and reliably have relinquished control over their portfolios to financial fiduciaries who apply history with the wrongheaded notion that things eventually correct—and by “correct,” they mean “rebound.” 

But what exactly is expanding? Well, not everything. Most people recognize that much of the market growth we’ve seen recently came from concentrated investment in the technology sector, the Magnificent 7 stocks, driven primarily by the new frontier in artificial intelligence. We see this growth and assume that the economy is on exceptionally solid footing, but the AI bubble—or if the rhetoric of a bursting bubble is too scary, we can sterilize it and call it the over-concentration of one sector of the economy—should actually concern more than just the nation’s top analysts.

So the economy appears to be expanding, but that growth is only theoretical. Investors are pouring money into post-industrial pits that will not be producing returns in the near-term. Meanwhile, an affordability crisis wracks the nation, as wages stagnate without incentives from the government and as inflation spikes because of the oil shocks. Tariffs have also artificially raised prices on consumers. And while the court has ordered the Trump administration to refund that revenue, consumers won’t be seeing any of that. Instead, the refund strategy the administration is pursuing only seems to provide only US companies with mid-year bonuses and relief. So much for Trump’s populist promises, which paved his path back to the presidency. 

But the economic and material realities of life in the United States doesn’t matter to Trump or his cronies, because the stock market is up, up, UP! And his voter base, though they disproportionately rely on the social welfare that Trump’s government is intent on dismantling and likely have very few assets in this booming stock market, continues to have faith in their president to stimulate the economy. And their grip over the Republican Party has forced politicians who have previously decried Trump’s brash and anti-intellectual style to either fall in line or leave Washington. As long as the chyron on CNBC, Fox News, and Newsmax continue to emit that deliciously radioactive green, Trump continues to enjoy support from his base and his party. 

And Trump uses that popularity and unwavering support to push through measures that increasingly threaten to undermine the bedrock of US liberal democracy. He has demonstrated a clear disdain for the proceduralism that has typified liberal democracy, unappreciative of the system of checks and balances that historically prevented power from concentrating in the hands of any individual over a country of 330M. In this second term, Trump has expanded the jurisprudential scope of the executive order to push through whatever suits his fancy, from decisions that literally dictate life or death—such as suspending assistance to under-developed nations—to vanity projects—such as his gaudy, decadent ballroom addition. 

The free-wheeling issuance of executive orders, 255 in the first 14 months of his second term alone, is partly smoke screen, one that Congressional Republicans seem fine to permit. And members of the Grand Old Party across the three branches seem intent to get out of Trump’s way. They’ve bought into the idea that Trump touts, that our economy is in a state of emergency, meaning normal rules and procedures ought to go out the window. 

Note the irony here: Trump wields rhetorical power over his party to completely alter their perception of the material world; the economy is doing so well we should keep letting him do what he wants, and the economy is simultaneously so poor we need to permit him to do whatever he wants. Perhaps Trump is a god, so effective at molding reality to his desires and commands?

Conclusion

To conclude this tirade, Trump’s power comes from an economy that seems to do well when he is in office. Part of the magic is Trump’s unparalleled charisma (some might say power over his base). The economy was similarly powerful under Biden. From January 2021 to January 2025, the S&P 500 gained 2,228.41 points (up 59.14%); the NASDAQ gained 6,631.7 points (up 51%); the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 12,490.85 points (up 40.3%); and the Russell 2000 gained 118.93 points (up 5.48%). However, the inflation that resulted from his efforts to stimulate the consumer economy after the COVID-19 shutdown—the infamous “price of eggs” campaign strategy—meant the typical US citizen suffered a crisis of confidence. Meanwhile, Trump’s constant references to stock market performance grants him a sort of power that makes his executive actions seemingly impervious to the criticisms leveled by Democrats that he is a threat to democracy. 

Blaming an individual or a group of individuals (financial advisors, fiduciaries, and intermediaries) is not very productive, though Trump seems to relish in scapegoating. But we should diagnose and seriously consider our relationships to history in these everyday scenarios, because they clearly build up to have much greater implications than measuring how your adjusted gross income changes over time when you implement one investment strategy over another. Applying history is important, but conscientiously applying it is even more important.