I want to share a passage from pages 241-242 of "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It jumped out at me while I was reading it. It provides insight into entrepreneurism.
"For example, when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930s, they 'discovered' dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop. In 1964 I met a 50-year old Chimbu man, unable to read, wearing a traditional grass skirt, and born into a society still using stone tools, who had become rich by growing coffee, used his profits to buy a sawmill for $100,000 cash, and bought a fleet of trucks to transport his coffee and timber to market. In contrast, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, the Daribi, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they briefly looked at it and just went back to what they had been doing; The Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them."
"For example, when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930s, they 'discovered' dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop. In 1964 I met a 50-year old Chimbu man, unable to read, wearing a traditional grass skirt, and born into a society still using stone tools, who had become rich by growing coffee, used his profits to buy a sawmill for $100,000 cash, and bought a fleet of trucks to transport his coffee and timber to market. In contrast, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, the Daribi, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they briefly looked at it and just went back to what they had been doing; The Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them."
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