John Tamny
The great Canadian economist Reuven Brenner noted in his 1983 book, History: The Human Gamble, that periods of massive income inequality frequently lead to economic innovation. Simply put, those who are not yet wealthy see those who are, and they gamble on exciting ideas in hopes of joining the existing rich at the top of the heap. As Brenner put it, “it is the perception of inequality that induces people to take risks.”
Along those lines, USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote in 2007 about his own career path compared to that of CNN’s Larry King. Neuharth observed: “[King] was a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn whose father died when Larry was in grade school. I was a poor German-Russian kid from South Dakota. My dad died when I was two. Larry and I both knew we’d have to take some big risks if we wanted to make it big time. He gambled on a late-night radio talk show that he got syndicated nationally in 1978. It ultimately developed into CNN’s Larry King Live. I gambled on USA Today in 1982. It became ‘The Nation’s Newspaper.'”
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