Entrepeneur |
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Created: 2023-11-04
Below is a quote from the book "Railroaded" that was talking about the men who build the railroads.
There is, however, something paradoxical in this logic. The rewards to entrepreneurs come quickly, but judgments about the utility and worth of their innovations come much more slowly. There arises a kind of evaluative shortcut in which all those who engaged in creative destruction — changing the nature of existing systems and reaped great rewards were, ipso facto, heroic entrepreneurs, producing a better product and a more efficient way of doing things. They contributed not only to their own wealth but to the efficiency of the system and the larger material advantage of humanity? A successful entrepreneur who created inefficient and prodigiously wasteful corporations becomes impossible, a contradiction in terms. By definition, the market is always right. Because of bad luck or bad timing, some good entrepreneurs might fail,but all bad ones did. But how do we know whether the market is right in rewarding particular entrepreneurs if we can only judge their innovations over the long term?
Quote from Good Reads about the book which highlights the above quote.
White claims the transcontinentals were built far too early when they were not needed, were drastically overbuilt, corruptly financed, and incompetently managed. They destroyed the environment and the Indian tribes, contributed to depressions and economic dislocation, and promoted poor land use and poor settlement patterns in the West. White concludes (p. 517): "The issue is not whether railroads should have been built. The issue is whether they should have been built when and where they were built. And to those questions the answer seems no. Quite literally, if the country had not built transcontinental railroads, it might not have needed them until much later, when it could have built them more cheaply, more efficiently, and with fewer social and political costs."