One widely cited version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis places its futuristic city in the year 2026.
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The future has arrived. In some ways, Lang saw it with remarkable clarity. In others, he missed something fundamental.
Lang got a surprising amount right. He anticipated massive urban skylines, advanced automation, instant communication, and deep social anxiety about technology. Nearly a century before artificial intelligence became a household topic, he imagined a world wrestling with machines.
Yet the most important thing Lang got wrong was not technological. It was economic.
The future he imagined was built from the top down.
The city of Metropolis is dominated by planners, managers, and industrial rulers. Society functions as a giant machine directed by a small group of decision-makers. Ordinary people are largely passengers. The powerful design the system. Everyone else operates within it.
That assumption was understandable in 1927.
The twentieth century was the age of grand plans. Intellectuals across the political spectrum believed that experts could organize society more effectively than the messy process of individual choice. Some envisioned central planning. Others imagined technocratic management. Many assumed that economic progress would increasingly be directed by governments, corporations, or large institutions.
History took a different path — and the detours are instructive.
Consider the defining technologies of modern life. Yes, the early internet grew from ARPANET, a Defense Department research project. Transistors emerged partly from Bell Labs, itself a creature of regulated monopoly. Government-funded research has value, and no honest account of American innovation can ignore it.
But government rarely excelled at predicting which innovations would matter most.
The personal computer, smartphones, online commerce, social media, ride-sharing, streaming services, and artificial intelligence were not products of national development plans. Each emerged from countless experiments by entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, and consumers responding to opportunities that no central authority fully anticipated or, in many cases, even recognized. Washington helped fund some of the underlying technologies. It did not build the ecosystem that turned them into everyday life.
Friedrich Hayek — the Austrian economist whose work helped define the modern case for free markets — identified why, decades before the tech revolution proved him right. In his landmark 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” he argued that prosperity doesn’t emerge because a handful of intelligent people possess extraordinary wisdom. It emerges because millions of ordinary people possess fragments of knowledge about their own circumstances, needs, and talents — knowledge no planner can gather, process, or act on in time. Markets coordinate that dispersed knowledge in ways central authorities cannot replicate.
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And when government substitutes its judgment for that of free individuals, it doesn’t risk being wrong. It forecloses alternatives that might have been right.
No committee in Washington could have predicted in 1990 that a college student would one day use a handheld device to summon transportation, conduct financial transactions, watch movies, communicate instantly across the world, and access a library larger than any collection in human history. Yet hundreds of millions of people now do exactly that — not because anyone planned it, but because countless people pursued opportunities no planner had foreseen.
The lesson is not that expertise is useless. The lesson is that expertise has limits, and that the gravest mistakes in economic history have come not from ignorance, but from overconfidence — from smart people who believed their intelligence exempted them from those limits.
That temptation remains very much with us, and it crosses party lines. Americans are told that economic challenges require larger planning efforts, more centralized management, and greater authority for institutions claiming superior knowledge. Industrial policy is fashionable again on both left and right. Mandates and managed competition are sold as sophisticated alternatives to the chaos of free markets.
But the recurring lesson of the past century is that the bias should run strongly toward freedom, because the cost of misplaced confidence compounds over time in ways the planners never account for.
The world of 2026 is far wealthier, healthier, and more technologically advanced than anything Lang imagined. The innovations that transformed modern life came overwhelmingly from places no planner expected and from people who possessed neither official authority nor elite credentials. A college dropout. A garage in Cupertino. A dorm room in Cambridge.
As Metropolis approaches its centennial, its enduring value may lie not in what it predicted correctly, but in what it fundamentally misunderstood. The future was never going to be designed by visionaries directing society from a control room high above the city. It was always going to be built by millions of people pursuing their own plans — imperfectly, competitively, and with a freedom that no grand design can replicate or replace.
The most powerful force in modern history turned out not to be the machine. It was the stubborn, creative, ungovernable energy of free people.
James Carter served as associate director of the National Economic Council at the White House and as deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Labor. He is a principal with Navigators Global and a policy adviser with America’s Economy First.
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