In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education.

From Adam Smith’s pin factory to Moore’s Law of microchips, the division of labor drives the extension of the market, not the other way around. Supply creates its own demand through the proliferation of goods and services down the curves of learning, entropy, and imagination.

The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius.

Alphabet, is worth nearly $800 billion, only about $100 billion less than Apple. How do you get rich by giving things away? Google does it through one of the most ingenious technical schemes in the history of commerce. Page’s and Brin’s crucial insight was that the existing advertising system, epitomized by Madison Avenue, was linked to the old information economy, led by television, which Google would overthrow.

A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability – old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.

The fact is there hasn’t been a thrilling new erogenous zone discovered since de Sade.

On every continent and in every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some of society’s greatest brutalities.

Surely women’s liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.

The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments have both a financial and an epistemic yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they award wealth to its creators, who have already proved that they can increase it. Their tests yield knowledge because they are falsifiable; they can be exposed as wrong. Businesses are subject to failure.

Money is not a magic wand but a measuring stick, not wealth but a gauge of it.