The Pipes Were Fine for Eighty Years (Episode 13)

Our basement flooded last Friday.

We’ve lived in this house since 2020. It’s flooded twice before, a few inches each time ... enough to be annoying, not enough to be alarming. This time it was feet, not inches. And it wasn’t just our house. It was the whole street. The pipes that failed don’t run under our foundation. They run under the road, and every house that drains into them found out at the same time we did.

Those pipes were laid around 1940 (when most of the houses were originally built). For eighty-some years, the pipes did their job. Then a storm came through that dumped more water, faster, than they were ever sized to carry ... hotter air holds more moisture, and when it lets go, it lets go all at once, in a way nobody designing a drainage system in 1940 had reason to plan for. The pipes did a 1940’s job in a 2026 reality.

So far, so good, is the entire logic of underground infrastructure. Nobody thinks about the pipe until the day the whole street finds out at once it can’t keep up. The city is supposedly bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers to help make sure this doesn’t happen again, but what if it didn’t have to happen in the first place?

I’ve been sitting with an idea from the economist Paul Krugman. He wrote a book called Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future ... I haven’t read it yet, I heard him talk about it in an interview, but the phrase stuck. He calls certain ideas “zombie ideas”: theories that keep shambling along no matter how many times they’re disproven, because they were never really being kept alive by evidence in the first place. They’re kept alive because somebody benefits from you still believing them.

Money runs on its own zombie ideas. But unlike real zombies who are created from a bite and are sustained by human flesh (sorry for the graphic reference), zombie ideas can be created and sustained in all sorts of ways.

Some personal finance zombie ideas were true once, and the world moved out from under them ... the same thing that happened to the pipes on our street. “Pay off your mortgage as fast as you possibly can” took hold during the Great Depression, when mortgages could be called at any time. The bank could demand the full balance, on its own timeline, whether you were ready or not, and plenty of families lost their homes because they weren’t ready when the bank called. Getting the mortgage gone fast was survival, not a preference. Mortgages haven’t worked that way in decades. They can’t be called anymore. That rule was correctly sized for a world that no longer exists ... which doesn’t mean it’s wrong for everyone now. It means it stopped being automatically right for everyone, the way it used to be.

Some personal finance zombie ideas were never true. They just sound like math. “Buy term and invest the difference” gets repeated like a law of arithmetic, but it developed as a sales pitch ... a way to sell one kind of policy by making the other one sound irrational. This zombie idea was marketing wearing a principle’s clothes from the very first day.

These zombie ideas have different origins, but the same reason both are still standing: changing either one costs somebody something today ... a commission, a sense of certainty, an uncomfortable conversation ... and nobody wants to pay that bill while the old idea still sort of looks fine.

I was born on public assistance in rural Ohio. I watched a macro version of this play out inside my own house before I had language for it: an economic idea called trickle-down, built on the theory that wealth at the top would eventually reach families like mine. It didn’t. My mom went back to college in her 30s, got us off public assistance, and provided for the family with her own sweat and stress, with very little “wealth” to show for it.

There’s a tin-foil hat version that says the failure of wealth making its way to us was because someone was lying about the theory on purpose. More likely, whatever truth it once had didn’t survive contact with the world it was actually being asked to work in by the time it reached my kitchen table.

I don’t write about zombie ideas in economics or in personal finance as an abstraction. I write about them as the water in my basement now and food on my kitchen table in the 1980s and 90s.

I hope to write more pieces about zombie ideas in personal finance and maybe even connect them to economic ones. The idea is to name one specific zombie idea still running in personal finance ... something everyone repeats because it used to be true, or because it sounds like math, and ask whose interest it’s actually serving by staying alive.

The meteorological storms aren’t 1940’s storms anymore. I pray we don’t repeat the same mistakes of that decade politically, economically, and internationally. Practically speaking though, it’s worth checking whether your pipes and your financial “rules” are sized for the future that’s actually coming. Are they even sized for today?

What’s a piece of financial advice you were taught that you’ve started to wonder if anyone’s actually checked lately? Tell me which one and perhaps it’ll show up in a future post.