Baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson also had a long career as a manager after his playing days were done. He once said in that latter capacity that you have to have a short memory as a closer. Simple wisdom where it’s true, all that matters for that style of pitching is the very next out. You can forget about what just happened so as to give your full energy and concentration to the batter at the plate.

They also say in football (American football to our foreign readers) that one of the most sought after traits in a prospective cornerback is the same lack of recall. You are inevitably going to get beat one on one for a big play or touchdown, so all that matters is that you don’t let it bother you the next time you line up.

Selective memory works in sports because very often you don’t want the bad to start to affect the good, as can happen given that we are all human. The playing surfaces of whatever game leave no time for learning, that comes later after the final bell or whistle in the space before the next game.

It doesn’t really work so much in other disciplines where time is a much less impressive component. To ignore especially the big mistakes is making another one even bigger, compounding the problem in what can be a self-reinforcing cycle.

Economists and the editorial standards that dominate the media appear to have the shortest memory, and since they don’t play in professional sports leagues it hasn’t served them well at all. It was just three short years ago that everything we are experiencing now occurred then. The economy escaped a near recession experience (2012) and accelerated but to a suspiciously small, and uneven, degree.

Rather than pay any attention to those attributes, they instead focused exclusively upon the acceleration. Rationalizing their bias as 2014 being only an intermediate stage that would prevail eventually upon actual recovery, the vast majority could hardly contain themselves for how awesome it was surely going to be. What economists want more than anything, and the media too (all rooting for the technocracy), is to be right about recovery because it would vindicate their worldview and therefore their hold on political influence.