Out of the East Quotes

“Accurate information and better technology are important in promoting discovery, but so are excessively optimistic, unrealistic, even flat-out false anticipations. The marvelous is more important than the scientific in the initial and most risky stages of innovation. Business histories tend to emphasize technological or conceptual, “paradigm-shifting” breakthroughs, but it is the crazes, fads, and marvels that seize the imagination, including that of investors and those who undertake physical and financial risks. The gold rush, the Internet craze, tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble—some of these were exaggerations, others were swindles, but they have a prominent, if unappealingly irrational, place in the history of innovation.”
― Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination