The Human Nature of a Speculator

Human nature and our kind of a predilection to succumb to speculation is something that's been around since the seventeenth century. I used the american railway boom in the nineteenth century to show how the government, through providing federal land grants and other subsidies to railroad corporations, incentivized private investment. And i can't remember all the stats, but it was like 80 thousand miles by 18 60, i believe, of railroad track had been laid,. In 18 forties, that figure was something like two thousand. So just this remarkable level of growth. And there was rampant speculation. There was l five or six financial panics in a forty year period that were all somehow directly linked to rail