The bubble made possible the British Empire at its economic height. People never stopped riding trains. Businesses never stopped shipping goods over them. The railways never went away, even after the investment mania did. The lesson of the dot-com bubble is similar. Of course, the dot-coms went away. Of course, AOL—for one brief shining moment, the embodiment of the Internet in American life—went away. But the Internet itself didn’t go away. And that’s why the railway example is so pertinent. All of the money poured into technology companies in the first half decade of the Internet Era created
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