 In summary, technological innovation shocks economies. Formerly profitable investments become relics of a bygone age and must be liquidated. Workers get laid off until they find some other way to produce goods wanted by today’s customers. Transitions are tough, miscalculations abound, but the upshot is that we grope toward heights made possible by a given innovation. Innovative ways of lowering transaction cost spread throughout a community, and failures (including once-useful but now obsolete innovations) are discarded. More precisely, failures are discarded if and when decision makers are innovators on the ground, learning to avoid losing their own money on ideas that fail to bear fruit in a given time and place.