The journalist Henry Hazlitt started his widely read Economics In One Lesson with the claim that “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.” This may indeed be true, but entrepreneurship should be a close second. 

A common but erroneous belief about entrepreneurship is that success is a property of the entrepreneurial idea itself. Sometimes described as an “opportunity” that was out there waiting to be discovered and exploited, all it took for the successful entrepreneur was to come up with the “right” idea at the right time. Henry Ford’s success wasn’t just the automobile, but the idea of an affordable automobile. Walmart is the result of Sam Walton having the idea of a low-cost retail store. The success of Sears was based on Richard W. Sears’ idea of using a catalog combined with shipping instead of physical stores. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook was the idea of putting the common student photo directory online to make it searchable. And so on.

Many of my students majoring in entrepreneurship suffer from believing in this myth: that it is the idea that makes the business and their success. Consequently, they seek that one great idea that will make them rich and successful. And when they find it, they therefore want to keep their idea secret and not tell anyone about it before launching the business. 

In stark contrast, practically all experienced entrepreneurs have the opposite view. Instead of keeping their ideas secret, they test their ideas in practice as soon and as often as they can. What matters is how the rubber hits the road, not the idea of a tire, so to speak. Experienced entrepreneurs seek feedback, not secrecy. Investors similarly put their money not on those amazing ideas that will “automagically” bring in the big bucks, but because they invest in the the person’s or team’s ability to build a successful business.

Certainly, a good idea helps. But it is not what makes a successful business.

As students learn in class, and entrepreneurs are forced to learn in practice, it is a common and often necessary entrepreneurial practice to pivot. Pivoting means “fundamentally changing the strategic direction or core aspects of a business.” If it is so common for entrepreneurs to change course mid-journey, then the great idea they supposedly pursued must not have been a sure thing. Rather, the outcome was uncertain.

In fact, entrepreneurship is often defined as uncertainty-bearing for the simple reason that the value of what is created can only be known after the fact. The expectation of value created is what justifies the entrepreneur’s decisions — including the strategy and costs of production. Experienced entrepreneurs include intended customers early in the start-up process and seek feedback.

This also suggests the oft-repeated truth in entrepreneurs’ and investors’ circles: that execution is king. The idea, core to the entrepreneurship myth, is in reality of very little import if the execution — how the product is positioned, presented, and provided — is not good enough. Similarly, an old and not even exciting idea that is executed as a unique and better positioning, presentation, and provision can be golden. It is not the thing that is sold that matters, but the totality of the customer experience. Or, simply put, the value in the customer’s eyes.

In other words, it often makes sense to not be the first mover but rather learn from the mistakes made by previous attempts — and instead find a better and more valuable positioning. Just like Pfizer had the idea for, and even developed the first-generation, but failed the entrepreneurial endeavor to create Ozempic, the success stories above — Ford, Walton, Sears, and Zuckerberg — excelled in their execution. Neither one of them was first or discovered an original grand idea for entrepreneurship. But all of them took product or business ideas that already existed and made them significantly better. 

As these examples also show, the entrepreneurs not only built from what already existed but they also did not succeed with the idea as it was originally conceived. Instead, they responded to feedback, learned from the market, and repositioned their offering — the value proposition — to be of as great value as possible to the intended customers. They pivoted, recognized their mistakes and failures, and tried again — using what they had learned. 

The myth is therefore the very opposite of real entrepreneurship. It is not the idea that makes a business or even an innovation. The idea is not unimportant, but what matters first and foremost is to be of service to customers. Because they are the ones who decide the value of what the entrepreneur has created. 

Entrepreneurship is rooted in humility rather than power; it’s about being of service to others rather than attempting to shape the world according to one’s own views.

The sooner we realize this true nature of entrepreneurship, the better we can understand the driving forces of market economies and the nature of our prosperity.

The overall rate of inflation declined sharply in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week. The Consumer Price Index fell 0.4 percent last month, a sharp reversal from the 0.5 percent increase in May. On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation eased to 3.5 percent from 4.2 percent, reversing three straight monthly increases in the annual rate and pulling it back from its highest reading in more than a year.

Core inflation cooled as well. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, CPI was flat in June, down from a 0.2 percent increase in May. On a year-over-year basis, core inflation eased to 2.6 percent from 2.9 percent.

As in recent months, much of the headline story came down to energy, but this time in reverse. The energy index fell 5.7 percent in June, its largest monthly decline since April 2020, and was, according to the BLS, “the largest contributor to the monthly all items decrease, more than offsetting increases in other indexes including those for shelter and food.” Gasoline prices fell 9.7 percent over the month, though they remain up 26.7 percent over the past year. The broader energy index is still up 15.7 percent, a reminder of how far energy prices had climbed during the oil shock tied to the conflict involving Iran and the disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

But the cooling was not confined to energy. Services excluding energy were flat in June, core goods prices fell 0.1 percent, and shelter rose just 0.1 percent, its smallest monthly increase since January 2021. That breadth distinguishes the June report from earlier months, when softer core readings often coexisted with persistent pressure in major service categories.

The recent trend confirms the price moderation. Over the three months through June, headline CPI rose at a 2.8 percent annualized rate, well below its 3.5 percent year-over-year pace. Core CPI rose at a 2.4 percent annualized rate over the same period, also below its 2.6 percent year-over-year rate. For the first time in months, recent momentum in both headline and core inflation is running cooler than the annual figures, not hotter.

Although the Federal Reserve officially targets the personal consumption expenditures price index, CPI data remain a timely and relevant gauge for policymakers. The June report clearly moved expectations. At the time of writing, the CME Group’s FedWatch tool put the probability that the Fed would raise rates at its meeting later this month at roughly 16 percent, down from 42 percent before the release. A hold is now the clear baseline expectation, pushing the debate over further tightening into the fall.

The labor market has lost some momentum as well. Employers added just 57,000 jobs in June, and the BLS revised April and May payrolls down by a combined 74,000. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.2 percent, average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent on the month and 3.5 percent over the past year, and labor-force participation slipped to 61.5 percent.

With workforce growth held down by an aging population and reduced immigration, even soft payroll gains need not signal a weakening economy. Indeed, June’s increase was roughly in line with the average over the prior year. But the combination of slower hiring and cooler prices marks a clear change from where things stood just a few months ago.

The case for tightening rested on inflation that was drifting higher and on the risk that the energy shock would spread to broader prices. That case has weakened. The June data offer the first meaningful sign that price pressures are abating rather than broadening.

Still, one month does not make a trend, and the deeper question is whether demand is moderating. A one-time oil shock changes relative prices. By itself, it cannot sustain inflation year after year; that requires nominal spending to continue outpacing the economy’s capacity to produce. The advance estimate of second-quarter GDP, due at the end of the month, will provide the first comprehensive reading on whether nominal spending has begun to slow. If it has, June’s report will look like the start of genuine disinflation. If it does not, the month may prove an energy-driven reprieve rather than a turning point.

For now, the Fed has little reason to change rates in July. The case for an increase, which markets took seriously only weeks ago, has faded. But inflation remains above target, and the labor market, though softer, is not weak enough to demand a cut.

In director Richard Linklater’s early ’90s classic Dazed and Confused, high school teacher Ms. Stroud (Kim Krizan) tells her class, right before dismissing them into the summer of 1976, that they should be skeptical of the incoming bicentennial hoopla they’re likely to encounter. She tells them that what everyone around them will really be celebrating is “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”  

That particular phrasing may be fictional, but it is not hard to imagine a young high school teacher, fresh out of college in the era of radical politics, delivering such a verdict to her teenage charges in the mid-1970s. And such lessons have only become more common over time. The left-wing contempt for our founding values has, by this point, acquired a long pedigree of its own, from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) to James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) and beyond.  

It is often said that any work of history reveals as much about the time in which it is written as it does the period on which it is ostensibly focused. While that is true of historical works in general, it seems virtually guaranteed to be true of a new book whose topic is the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

After 250 years of conflict and compromise, the Declaration is still considered essential US political theory and the starting point for arguments about which sort of country we have, and which sort we should have. Richard Reinsch’s new edited collection of essays — The Civitas Collection 250 — certainly fits into that tradition.

A student of US history approaching debates over the American Founding for the first time might not see this immediately. Many of the essayists spend most of their time in the eighteenth century, or before. The writings of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Dickinson get plenty of attention, as do familiar names like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Montesquieu, and famous precedent documents like the Declaration of Right (1689), Petition of Right (1628), and Magna Carta (1215). But first impressions can be deceiving. 

Is Kody Cooper’s essay on the sources of liberty in the Declaration of Independence, for example, just about the development of law and philosophy prior to the American founding? He certainly covers writers ranging from Cicero and Tacitus to Richard Hooker and Locke, but he also moves forward in time to contrast the founding principles of the Declaration to much later interpreters. Arguing for a universalist view of the rights proclaimed in 1776, Cooper writes “Contrary to exclusive interpretations advanced by later jurists like Justice Roger Taney and his successors among the critical race theorists, the word ‘men’ did not mean merely white men.”  

In the blink of an eye, the discussion zoomed past the ancient philosophers and early modern legalists to The 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi. The contributors to The Civitas Collection are all serious scholars with much to say about the founding era, but it is also clear they have contemporary battles to wage with their interpretation of what our founding documents really say. With the Declaration functioning, in the famous words of the late historian Pauline Maier as “American scripture,” it seems inevitable that most combatants in US politics will want to claim the document’s mantle for their own preferred ideological strain. 

Some of these conflicts are longstanding and easily recognizable ones, between political theorists of the right and the left. Cynicism about the motives and beliefs of the founding generation, for example, is not new. 

Anti-hagiographies of the Revolutionary generation are so common they’ve inspired their own subgenre of anti-anti-founding fathers publishing, including books like Thomas West’s Vindicating the Founders (1997), Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004), and Brion McClanahan’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers (2009). 

Those left-versus-right debates continue to be timely and there’s plenty of scholarship in the present volume to illuminate them further. But perhaps more interesting are the fights, more often flying under the radar, that are happening within the center-right segment of the political spectrum. Not between conservatives and Marxists, but between nationalists, libertarians, classical liberals, new whigs, and whatever else the non-leftists of America are calling themselves these days.     

Adam Lebowitz, for example, laments early in his essay that a “broadly libertarian reading [of the Declaration] has hardened into something like conventional wisdom.” Rather than being fearful of executive authority and a strong government because of the negative example of King George III, Lebowitz argues that our founders thought of the Declaration as “a warrant for a stronger, more energetic government, grounded in democratic sovereignty and endowed with plenary powers.”  

The argument that the spirit of the Declaration was consistent with a strong executive and a federal government of essentially unbounded authority obviously has implications for how the powers of the presidency are practiced and circumscribed in the age of Donald Trump. High-profile debates over immigration and deportation, National Guard deployments, and the bombing of Iran are directly relevant to whether our nation’s founders are perceived to have been wary and concerned about dictatorial executive power or in favor of its wide exercise.  

Even more pointed is the contribution of former deputy attorney general John Yoo, who writes, “We should not mistake…the colonists’ frontal attack on tyranny for a rejection of the idea of executive power,” stating plainly that “the Declaration of Independence itself is not a rejection of executive power.” Yoo documents the history of the Articles of Confederation and the rapidly evolving state constitutions of the 1780s, which initially favored a very weak (often plural) executive, but were quickly reformed to establish offices of more effective leadership. Yoo’s previous scholarship and policy advocacy for a maximalist view of the president’s war powers during the George W. Bush administration are clearly relevant here.    

Beyond the specific powers of the federal government — the kind that can be parsed in a decision of the Supreme Court, for example — contributors also take on the wider cultural understanding of the Declaration. Wilfred McClay, for example, considers the contemporary divide “between creed and culture.” He asks whether being an American is defined more by embracing the universal propositions of the Declaration’s famous second paragraph (about all men being created equal) or whether our Americanness has as much, or more, to do with the unique heritage of our geographical homeland.   

This question could, of course, not be more timely. One of the hottest debates in the second Trump administration has been over the birthright citizenship doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether it is just and reasonable to gatekeep US citizenship based on racial, religious, ethnic, or other criteria. Are we all equal as Americans because of the doctrine of the Declaration, or are some Americans with longer North American lineages, so-called “Heritage Americans,” entitled to more deference and privileges? And if not formal legal privileges, some ask, are they at least able to credibly claim to be “more American” than someone who took the oath of citizenship yesterday?  

Contributors to The Civitas Collection 250 also take on that other great cause of the day: tariffs and trade. Samuel Gregg, in particular, lays out how the American Revolution was an anti-mercantilist one, with much of the fervor of the patriot cause generated by infringements on the colonists’ commercial relationships, not just the rights and relationships that are usually considered to have the most sublime claim to moral seriousness.  

Many popular revolts against alleged tyranny, both before and after 1776, centered on things like religious conscience and freedom of expression. Certainly, many of the violent and bloody conflicts in the West between the time of the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia involved both. Colonists of British North America were relatively short on complaints about burning churches, executions for heresy, smashed printing presses, and tarred-and-feathered pamphleteers. They did, however, complain most vociferously about the King “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and being subjected to the British East India Company’s crown-granted monopoly on tea and other commodities.

As with the other questions about contemporary public policy, the attitude of the founders toward the freedom to trade is directly relevant to what the president and Congress are doing today. The late eighteenth century was a significantly less globally integrated place, with much of British North America consisting of smallholding farmers who rarely traded with anyone more than a day’s journey from home. If the freedom to buy and sell goods internationally was important enough to help spark the American Revolution back then, how much more important should we consider it to be in the twenty-first century of the Internet, containerized shipping, and FedEx? 

American history nerds will love poring over the detailed references in the book and noticing references to events and documents that are often forgotten today, like the Continental Congress’ Olive Branch Petition (1775) or the infamous Cornerstone Speech (1861) by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens. 

Armchair political theorists will likewise thrill to the supporting roles played by a long list of distinguished thinkers, both prominent and obscure. The academic tone may be a little intimidating for regular Americans just hoping for some Independence Day fireworks, but amateur historians and bookish patriots everywhere will no doubt love the collection Reinsch has assembled.  

A common argument for government regulation and taxation of tech companies begins with the observation that government research has contributed to the success of those companies. Mariana Mazzucato, professor of the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, writes:

Much of modern technology came from a collective investment, with public institutions like the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) or the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), leading the way in the most high-risk capital-intensive phase. What would Google be without the DARPA-funded internet? What would Uber be without the US Navy-funded GPS? What would Apple be without the CIA-funded touch-screen technology and DARPA-funded voice assistant, Siri?

Thinkers like Mazzucato seem to view the state as a sort of partner in these businesses; after all, it’s only fair that a partner should get a cut of the profits and a say in their operations. 

“We need to develop a new governance structure, which starts with creating a new vocabulary,” she says. “For example, calling platform companies ‘tech giants’ implies they have invested in the technologies from which they are profiting, when it was really taxpayers who funded the key underlying technologies — from the Internet to GPS.”

This argument is particularly relevant to the case of AI, especially as both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have expressed support for partial government ownership of major AI companies. Mazzucato herself suggests that government officials ought “to actively steer [AI’s] development.”

At first glance, the claim that governments are entitled to help control AI companies because they helped create AI sounds plausible. If you were part of building something, don’t you deserve a share of it?

The case for government control of tech companies is far more complicated than it appears, however. 

First, note that people are compelled to fund government research. To see why this makes a moral difference, consider a case inspired by the philosopher Michael Huemer. 

Suppose you’re an entrepreneur in the beverage industry trying to create a new soda. One day, a rogue food scientist bursts into your office and demands money for his flavor research. He doesn’t ask politely or offer you a contract; he points a gun at you and takes your money. Years later, he develops a delicious new synthetic flavor. You discover it, add it to your soda, and your company takes off, making you a multimillionaire.

Does the food scientist now own part of your company because you used his flavor? Of course not. There’s no doubt your business benefited from his research. Without the flavor he created, your soda might never have existed. But the scientist has already been paid — and it’s worth remembering that he obtained that payment by force. The idea that he’s entitled to additional compensation because you successfully used his research is absurd. Contributing an input does not automatically confer ownership over everything built with that input. Likewise, the fact that government-funded research contributed to AI development does not automatically give the government ownership rights in AI companies.

In fact, the “government investment” argument fails even in a friendlier scenario that doesn’t involve coercion. Imagine that you voluntarily hire the food scientist to develop a new flavor. You agree to pay him $100,000 for his research, and he accepts. You then use the flavor he creates to launch a highly successful soda company.

Again, the food scientist does not own part of your company merely because he contributed to its success. He is entitled to whatever compensation the agreement specifies — nothing more and nothing less. If the contract grants him an equity stake, he has a claim to it. If it doesn’t, he doesn’t. That’s how market exchange generally works. Suppliers of inputs do not automatically acquire ownership of outputs. If the government wants to fund research in exchange for equity, it can try to negotiate those terms in advance. But that’s very different from claiming, after the fact, that successful companies partly belong to the government because some of the knowledge they relied upon emerged from government-funded research.

If merely contributing to a business entitled someone to partial ownership, every business would face endless competing claims from the countless people who helped make it possible. Imagine your local barista claiming partial ownership of the house you built ten years ago because the coffee she sold you helped fuel its construction.

This matters because property rights determine who gets to make decisions about how resources are used. A workable system of property rights requires clear rules for identifying who controls an asset. Without such rules, individuals and firms could never know whether they were free to use, improve, or exchange a resource. In market economies, ownership is generally determined by voluntary agreement, not by the mere fact of having played some causal role in a project’s success. The food scientist is paid as agreed; he does not acquire an open-ended claim on everything his work makes possible. Likewise, even if government-funded research contributed to the development of AI, it does not follow that governments thereby acquire ownership rights over AI companies. Causal contribution may explain how something came into existence, but it is not enough to establish a right to control it.

Public conversations about billionaires tend to oscillate between fascination and condemnation. Headlines emphasize excess, inequality, political influence, or corporate misconduct. And while criticism in some instances is certainly warranted, if we look only through the lens of suspicion, we risk overlooking the unexpected ways private fortunes sometimes become public inheritances.

California has long been a proving ground for where fortunes were spent as quickly as they were made. It is where private ambition often takes physical form in estates, gardens, and grand personal experiments which escape the boundaries of wealth itself, transforming over time to enrich civic life long after their creators are gone.

To illustrate this point, let’s consider the lives of a few remarkable women whose relationships with wealth were strikingly different, yet whose legacies ultimately became public in unexpected ways. Some inherited fortunes. Some accumulated wealth through relationships and social mobility. Others earned influence through ideas rather than vast riches. But in California, each left behind something larger than herself.

Consider Ganna Walska. She was born in Poland in 1887, and reinvented herself repeatedly throughout her life. She moved through elite circles in Europe and America as an opera singer, socialite, and cosmopolitan celebrity. Her wealth came largely through a series of marriages to extraordinarily rich men, including multimillionaire carpet tycoon Alexander Smith Cochran and industrial heir Harold Fowler McCormick. Critics often regarded her as flamboyant and indulgent, a woman better known for glamour than substance. Yet in Santa Barbara, Walska built something extraordinary.

What began as a private estate evolved into Lotusland, now one of the most celebrated botanical gardens in the United States. Walska purchased the property in 1941 and spent decades reshaping it according to her own tastes. She transformed lawns into dramatic cactus collections, sculptural gardens, and exotic landscapes unlike anything else in America. Lotusland made little sense in traditional economic terms, yet its cultural capital is now immense. Visitors from around the world wander its paths, generating tourism, education, and conservation benefits Walska likely never fully anticipated.

Now consider a stranger example in California of how a private indulgence can generate second-order benefits. That of Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune. Sarah Lockwood Pardee married William Wirt Winchester in 1862 and the family fortune grew as the company’s rifles became famous in the post–Civil War American West, eventually earning the nickname “the gun that won the West.”

But Sarah’s personal life was marked by profound tragedy. In 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter who died only a few weeks later. Then, in 1881, Sarah’s husband William died of tuberculosis. By her early forties, Sarah had lost her family but inherited a vast fortune.

Grief-stricken and increasingly reclusive, Winchester relocated to California and began construction on what became the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. According to popular legend, spiritual advisors convinced her she was haunted by those killed by Winchester rifles and that continuous building would keep malevolent forces at bay.

For decades, construction continued almost without logic or restraint. The mansion grew into a labyrinth of staircases leading nowhere, doors opening into walls, oddly proportioned rooms, hidden passages, and architectural dead ends. To many contemporaries, the estate appeared little more than irrational excess and a waste of wealth.

Yet history has a curious habit of repurposing private eccentricity into public value. Today, the Winchester Mystery House is one of California’s most beloved tourist attractions. It is a site of fascination, storytelling, and local identity. What looked absurd in one generation became cultural curiosity in another.

And then there is Ayn Rand, who also settled in California but whose story offers a deliberate contrast. Unlike Walska and Winchester, Rand did not inherit a fortune or accumulate one through marriage. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, she fled Soviet collectivism for the United States, eventually becoming one of the twentieth century’s most influential defenders of capitalism and individual ambition. Rand’s intellectual work established her philosophy of Objectivism, celebrated builders and creators, and shaped generations of political and economic thought.

During the 1940s, Rand lived with her husband, Frank O’Connor, in the dramatic Von Sternberg House in Southern California. Designed by Richard Neutra for Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg, the house was one of California’s most architecturally significant private homes. Rand called it “unbelievably wonderful.” It was here that she wrote much of Atlas Shrugged, her most ambitious work, but her deep engagement with architecture and beauty had already found full expression in The Fountainhead, completed before she arrived in the San Fernando Valley. That novel, built around a fiercely idealistic architect who refuses to compromise his vision, suggests that Rand understood, perhaps better than most, what it meant to shape physical space as an act of individual will.

But here the pattern breaks with that of Lotusland or the Winchester house. Rand’s California residence did not survive to become a public place. The house was demolished in 1972, after Rand had sold it in 1951, and with it went one of Neutra’s most unusual works. In hindsight, many came to see the demolition as a major cultural loss, and some historians argue that it helped spur the formation of later preservation movements like the Los Angeles Conservancy.

Overall, the contrast between these women is striking. Ganna Walska accumulated wealth through relationships and left behind beauty. Sarah Winchester inherited wealth and left behind mystery. Ayn Rand earned wealth through ideas and intellectual property and left behind a legacy.

California, perhaps more than anywhere else, reminds us that private ambitions have strange afterlives, and this broader perspective matters particularly in an era when the rich are often portrayed only as symbols of inequality or excess. Criticism has its place, but premises matter. If we begin from the assumption that concentrated wealth produces nothing beyond private consumption, we miss the ways history often transforms private visions into public goods, long after the owners of the property pass on.

Undoubtedly, extraordinary wealth creates extraordinary discretion, and billionaires can shape private worlds according to their own tastes and desires. But what is beautiful, bizarre, or deeply personal is up to the owner until their time passes. Critics may dismiss such projects as extreme, and sometimes they are. Yet history often proves less interested in motives than outcomes.

Private estates, as depicted above, have morphed into public treasures, and this pattern stretches far beyond California. Pierre du Pont’s horticultural passions produced Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, still one of the finest display gardens in the world. Henry Huntington’s railroad fortune gave rise not only to a legendary art collection and rare manuscript library, but to the stunning botanical gardens at his San Marino estate. The Vanderbilt family’s Biltmore Estate evolved from conspicuous luxury into a regional economic engine. And Rockefeller wealth transformed Kykuit into a cultural institution.

Public debate often treats extraordinary wealth as either proof of virtue or evidence of vice. Reality is usually more nuanced and more surprising. A pleasure garden becomes a sanctuary. A strange mansion becomes folklore. A demolished house becomes the reason a city learns to protect what it has. The rich, it turns out, have a habit of leaving things behind that those who would redirect their wealth never thought to build and couldn’t even imagine.

Thankfully, there are still some college professors who are not afraid to speak their minds on hot-button issues where their views will collide with prevailing academic orthodoxy.

One of them is Duke University professor Adrian Bejan.  He has taught mechanical engineering there since 1984 and has authored numerous scientific books with a particular emphasis on constructal law — the organizing principle by which natural phenomena and human-designed systems evolve in a way that facilitates the optimal flow of energy and material through them. He has just published a new book entitled Diversity Through Freedom. In it, he contrasts the beneficial results that stem from diversity in nature and among humans with the harmful results that we see when governments, universities, or other organizations impose their plans for diversity (or equality or other goals) through force. 

Bejan’s thinking was shaped by his youth in Romania, then ruled by a communist dictatorship. His family suffered under the regime because his parents were not of the favored “working class.” Bejan recounts how one night his father conspicuously burned many of his books to show that he wasn’t an enemy of the people — but as he explained to his son, it was the least valuable ones that were burned; the most important ones were saved and carefully hidden. In school, Bejan quickly figured out that much of what he was being taught was misleading, manipulative jargon “enrobed in clever metaphors that fool the young.” But he couldn’t be fooled. 

In studying natural phenomena, Bejan concluded, “What changes the world is the ability to act, to make change, without fear. The ability does not come top-down from voices in high places. The ability bubbles up from the bottom, in a few enterprising individuals, engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, and doers.” What we should strive for, therefore, is freedom for people to learn and try — equality of opportunity, not equality of result. He often points to sports to make his point. Teams find the best players naturally and they would not be nearly as successful if they were required to make their rosters conform to some imposed notion of “diversity.” 

The book abounds in scientific evidence for constructal law, with numerous photographs and charts. The message that will most resonate with AIER readers, I believe, is Bejan’s point that freedom optimizes outcomes while coercion leads to waste and conflict. His observations directly challenge many “progressive” beliefs about society.  

Consider, for example, Bejan’s views about the academic world. He writes, “Academia is in trouble when the structure becomes rigid, which happens when those in charge refuse to be questioned because they are an elite, deeply in bed with even more powerful elites such as the government.” Unfortunately, our academic leaders are now much less interested in new ideas than they are in securing as much grant money for their institutions as they can from government officials. “Big money,” Bejan writes, “is funneled to those who promise ‘energy’ materials and ‘live matter’, not to those who dare to speak of fuels, machines and microscopic configurations in motion. Notions from creators with dirty hands are beneath the ruling class of science, which is indoctrinated in reductionism, and marching obediently behind the invisible.” Thus, much of the money that we spend on research is squandered. 

Nowhere is the malign influence of academic groupthink more evident than in the quest for artificial diversity.  University officials have so thoroughly succumbed to this artificial ideology that it infects the curriculum, hiring decisions, and research projects. Merit counts for much less than the happenstance of a person’s background — whether he or she is from an “underrepresented” group. But Bejan doesn’t think that most of the leaders who bow down to this idea actually believe it. He writes, “In reality, colleges and universities have never been woke. Instead, it’s more apt to understand these institutions as oriented around the interests and worldviews of highly educated and relatively well-off suburban whites — often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged in society — ‘social justice’ discourse notwithstanding.”  

Nevertheless, the “diversity” mania marches on.  Bejan finds it chillingly similar to other ideological movements in this century where people were rewarded or punished merely because of their class background. He writes, “From Latsis, Timoshenko, and Grossman, we see a project of destroying the individual and replacing him with a new ‘disadvantaged class’ that wins the class struggle by force….It was all an envious and murderous dream and its henchmen are still busy today.” 

In sum, nature yields a diversity of talent, which leads to progress and benefits for all. Capitalism works that way, as do competitive sports. Unfortunately, an elite few are not content to allow nature to take its course, demanding instead an artificial system they impose and control. Bejan hits the nail on the head when he states, “The class struggle is a design of unnatural diversity: only two classes, not the natural diversity of individuals with freedom to live, associate voluntarily, and move.” 

What does the future hold? Bejan is optimistic that today’s diversity mania will die out “like all the other unnatural prescriptions.” I wish I could share that optimism; the desire of some elitists to dictate how a society must function seems to be more firmly rooted in America than ever and their tools of domination are powerful.