Social safety nets and ahistoricity

From the studiously moderate Brookings Institution:

[T]he old doctrine that the safety net is always and everywhere antithetical to growth is beginning to be reassessed. Dawning instead, as we have observed elsewhere, is a recognition that a high-tech economy fueled by disruptive innovation actually requires a stronger safety net, if only to maintain the public’s tolerance for its inherent dislocations.

Prompting the new thinking is a litany of findings about how the “disruptive innovation” that drives a dynamic market system tends also to destabilize industries and displace workers.

This is encouraging to read but not exactly “new thinking”.  From ‘Social Organizations, Violence, and Modern Growth‘:

Social institutions can promote economic growth by fostering risk taking and reducing violence. This was noted as early as 1797 when Sir F.M. Eden argued that “any … machines or contrivances calculated to lessen labour … throw many industrious individuals out of work; and thus create distresses that are sometimes exceedingly calamitous” (vol. 1, p. xiv). Social institutions, he added, are important to insure that the “inconvenience to [these] individuals will be softened and mitigated” (ibid).

They say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.  What about those for whom it is repeatedly misrepresented in order to serve ideological ends?