Setembro 2025

“Consider this passage by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder: ‘The TV manufacturing industry really started here, and at one point employed many workers. But as TV sets became ‘just a commodity,’ their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure. No, a success.’

I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industries.”

(…)

"There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness massproduced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up."

“Each time I see a headline announcing that officials from the United States and China are once more butting heads, I feel that the state of affairs is more than just tragic; it is comical, too, because I am sure that no two people are more alike than Americans and Chinese.

A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.”

“This was a time of decadent wealth and competing empires. Technology and science were advancing at a rapid pace. Cities ballooned in population as more people joined the working and middle classes. Industrialization brought modern-day conveniences, and mass media emerged to satisfy the eager public. Labor unrest and mass politics became a fact of life. Many experimental art movements took shape, as the old ways to describe the world needed updating. It was accepted that accelerating change and exponential growth would be the new normal.

Some rejected where this new world was headed, while others accepted it. But regardless of where one stood, the overarching feeling for the average Western European—and the one aspect we relate to the most today—was speed. Things were moving too fast, everything was up for grabs, and there was no telling what kind of society would emerge or who would ultimately wield power.”

“All of these inventions have a single meaning: simultaneity. Londoners, Parisians, and Viennese listen at the same second to the same thing, and the supernatural proportions of this simultaneity, of this uniformity, are intoxicating. There is an intoxication, a stimulus for the masses, in all of these new technological miracles, and simultaneously an enormous sobriety of the soul, a dangerous seduction of the individual into passivity. Here too, as in dance, fashion, and the cinema, the individual acquiesces to a herdlike taste that is everywhere the same, no longer making choices that accord with internal being but ones that conform to the opinion of a world.

One could infinitely multiply these symptoms, and they multiply themselves from day to day on their own. The sense of autonomy in matters of pleasure is flooding the times. It will soon be harder to list the particularities of nations and cultures than the features they share in common.”

(…)

“What is the source of this terrible wave threatening to wash all the color, everything particular out of life? Everyone who has ever been there knows: America. The historians of the future will one day mark the page following the great European war as the beginning of the conquest of Europe by America. Or, more accurately, the conquest is already rippingly underway, and we simply fail to notice it (conquered peoples are always too-slow thinkers).

(…)

American boredom is restless, nervous, and aggressive; it outruns itself in its frantic haste, seeks numbness in sports and sensations. It has lost its playfulness, scurries along instead in the rabid frenzy of an eternal flight from time. It is always inventing new artifices for itself, like cinema and radio, to feed its hungry senses with nourishment for the masses, and it transforms this common interest in enjoyment into concerns as massive as its banks and trusts.

America is the source of that terrible wave of uniformity that gives everyone the same: the same overalls on the skin, the same book in the hand, the same pen between the fingers, the same conversation on the lips, and the same automobile instead of feet.”

“So if the entire country became security analysts, memorized Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investor, and regularly attended Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder meetings, most people would, nevertheless, find themselves irresistibly drawn to hot initial public offerings, momentum strategies and investment fads. Even if they somehow managed to be long-term value investors with a portion of their capital, people would still find it tempting to day-trade and perform technical analysis of stock charts. People would, in short, still be attracted to short-term, get-rich-quick schemes. People would notice which of their friends and neighbors were becoming rich—and they would quickly find out how. When others did well (if only temporarily), people would find it irksome not to be participating and begin to copy whatever was working today. There is no salve for the hungry investor like the immediate positive reinforcement that comes from making money instantaneously.

A country of security analysts would still overreact. They would shun stigmatized companies, those experiencing financial distress, or those experiencing accounting problems. They would still liquidate money-losing positions as they were making new lows. They would avoid less liquid securities, since those are the last to participate in a rally and hard to get out of when things go wrong. In short, a country full of well-trained investors would make the same kind of mistakes that investors have been making forever, and for the same immutable reason—that they cannot help it.”

“All entrepreneurs begin with three categories of means: (1) Who they are – their traits, tastes and abilities; (2) What they know – their education, training, expertise, and experience; and, (3) Whom they know – their social and professional networks. Using these means, the entrepreneurs begin to imagine and implement possible effects that can be created with them. Most often, they start very small with the means that are closest at hand, and move almost directly into action without elaborate planning. Unlike causal reasoning that comes to life through careful planning and subsequent execution, effectual reasoning lives and breathes execution. Plans are made and unmade and revised and recast through action and interaction with others on a daily basis. Yet at any given moment, there is always a meaningful picture that keeps the team together, a compelling story that brings in more stakeholders and a continuing journey that maps out uncharted territories. Through their actions, the effectual entrepreneurs’ set of means and consequently the set of possible effects change and get reconfigured. Eventually, certain of the emerging effects coalesce into clearly achievable and desirable goals -- landmarks that point to a discernible path beginning to emerge in the wilderness.

Yet, in our classrooms, we teach potential entrepreneurs an extremely causal process – the sequential progression from idea to market research, to financial projections, to team, to business plan, to financing, to prototype, to market, to exit, with the caveat, of course, that surprises will happen along the way. Seasoned entrepreneurs, however, know that surprises are not deviations from the path. Instead they are the norm, the flora and fauna of the landscape, from which one learns to forge a path through the jungle. The unexpected is the stuff of entrepreneurial experience and transforming the unpredictable into the utterly mundane is the special domain of the expert entrepreneur.”