Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 389 of Johan Norberg’s splendid 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages [footnote deleted; link added]:

The Industrial Revolution came about when entrepreneurs and engineers gained the freedom, knowledge and inspiration to innovate and improve, and this was not dependent on colonial capital. Unlike some earlier interpretations, it was not a big push of investment that got industry going. Usually businesses started with small sums scraped together from relatives and acquaintances, and then the main source of funding was self-finance – entrepreneurs ploughed their profits back into the business. The revolution ‘pulled itself up by its bootstraps’.