Someone this week pointed out that after WWII we ran a natural experiment.

We had 8 million extra productive people show up all at once, with only a month to plan what to do with them.

Also, everyone could agree that we should trust those people because they had put their lives on the line for the country.

This discontinuity plus broad trust allowed something miraculous to happen.

We extended credit to everyone and the economy boomed.

If you give cheap credit, you need to believe that the people it's given to will be worth it.

It's an emergent social imaginary; if everyone doesn't believe it then it's not true, but if everyone does, it is.

WWII created the external alignment, discontinuous and broad.

Today it would be very hard to do.

If you have a slow drip of people of the same age and ability, but they're playing video games and the older generation thinks they're just losers, no one gives them credit.

What if we just all agreed to believe in all of the young people at once?

How could we make that happen?