There is a thaw in the air. The tectonic plates of a sea change are beginning to shift, and I suspect we are going to begin once again to see the frozen-in-its-tracks steel industry melt and march along its Darwinian destiny. We've seen it before, when economic forces erupt like Vesuvius on Pompeii . . . a kind of global timeout.

Change was the driver of the steel industry from 2003 to 2008, and the rate of change accelerated steadily over that time frame. Eventually steel investment became yet another bubble to go into the history books with dot-coms, real estate and tulips. I have chronicled those excesses in laborious and sometimes obsessive detail both in this space as well as in my own research publications.

I wrote my first AMM column in summer 2007 and talked about two things: first, the lessons that I—and many others—had learned from the prior three decades; and then about the process of learning lessons, as cultural evolution, and how lessons get lost as generations pass. Because all of this has happened before. And it will happen again.

Change will be reasserting itself in...