Gary Olson
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in one of his short stories, “The very rich are very different than you and me”. Ernest Hemingway has a character in one his reply by saying “Yes, they have more money.” A more concise retort might be that the secret behind every great fortune is a great theft, to paraphrase Honore de Balzac.
Bill Gates and computers are instructive examples. First, from birth, Gates benefited from numerous external advantages that played a critical role in his later success. They ranged from wealthy, well-connected parents and an elite private school in Seattle to unique access to early computers and exposure to software development even before graduating from high school. For an account of Gates’s many advantages — and a thorough assault of the myth of the “self-made man” in the United States — I recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers: The Story of Success” (NY: Little Brown and Co. 2008).
Further, the vaunted AT&T and its Bell Laboratory was a wholly government supported monopoly. They developed the transistor but because of its prohibitive expense, for their first decade only the government procured them for military application. Incidentally, Flamm points out that because European governments were reluctant to provide these massive taxpayer subsidies to industry, Europe fell hopelessly behind the United States.
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