"WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE"
So said Antonio in Shakespeare's The Tempest, to his co-conspirator Sebastian, to justify the murderous act they were about to commit. Today the phrase is used less ominously to mean that history sets the stage for what happens next. About that there can be little doubt. The present is necessarily built on the foundations of what has come before. This leads us to believe that our future will be an extension of the present. In the world of psychology, this is known as "recency bias." However, the future often plays out very differently than expected because we have misinterpreted what has actually happened and ignored obvious risks.