When the Allied occupation ended in 1952, Japan’s “GNP was little more than 1/3 that of France or the UK. By the late 1970s the Japanese GNP was a large as the UK’s and France’s combined and more than half the size of America’s.”


It is hard to imagine, but a country whose productivity growth lags 1 percent behind other countries over one century can turn, as England did, from the world’s indisputed industrial leader into the mediocre economy it is today.


In 1913, Imperial Russia had a real product per man-hour 3 times greater than Japan’s but it has spent its nigh 70 socialist years slipping relatively backwards, to maybe a quarter of Japan’s rate now.


In 1959, the entrepot-trade dependent economy was stagnating. Singapore’s merchant class were essentially traders, adept and agile in trading rubber, sugar, and rice. They lacked knowledge about and the technology involved in manufacturing, transportation, or even managing five star hotels. In critical areas, the state had no choice but to co-invest with private entrepreneurs, providing risk capital and access to technology.


The ugly duckling has since been transformed into the six-star Fullerton Hotel.


Public esteem is capricious. When politicians are on the rise, the people and media are full of praise. But as soon as they fall, stars become pariahs overnight.


But there are some things that the news doesn’t cover. In reality, many corrupt Chinese officials were once political stars, workaholics famed for their ability to deliver results, who were genuinely appreciated by local residents.


At that time, Europe’s relative weaknesses were more apparent than its strengths. It was not the most fertile area of the world, nor was it particularly populous — important criteria by the measure of the day, when the soil was the source of most wealth, and human and animal muscle of most power. Europe exhibited no pronounced advantages in the fields of culture, mathematics, or engineering, navigation or other technologies. It was also a deeply fragmented continent, consisting of a hodgepodge of petty kingdoms, principalities and city-states. Further, at the end of the 15th century, Europe was in the throes of a bloody conflict with the mighty Ottoman Empire, which was pushing its way, inexorably it seemed, towards the gates of Vienna.


It is often forgotten that the majority — around 69 percent — of British emigrants in the 17th century went not to America but to the West Indies. That, after all, was where the money was. Trade with the Caribbean dwarfed trade with America: in 1773 the value of British imports from Jamaica was five times greater than those from all the American colonies.


How much more disappointed he would have been to see the statues of the Queen-Empress and sundry imperial proconsuls that stand today in the neglected back yard of Lucknow Zoo, where they were dumped after Indian independence. There can be few more vivid emblems of the transience of imperial achievement than the immense marble Victoria that dominates this shabby little spot.


Conversely, when the actual weakness of France revealed itself in military defeat, there developed a tendency in France and elsewhere to expect that weakness to endure. France was treated with neglect and disdain as though it were bound to be weak forever.


The thought of the US becoming the world’s richest and most powerful nation would have been unimaginable at the time of the country’s founding. In 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, the US was a marginal commercial center, far from the powers of Europe and the riches of Asia. It was a farm-based, subsistence economy with a small export trade in grains, tobacco, and salted fish and limited manufacturing.


In the late 19th century, America’s cities, linked by telegraph and railroad, grew at prodigious rates. The fastest growing was Chicago, which wen from a fairly small town in 1840 (whose population was less than 5K) to the second largest city in the US (with nearly 1.1M people) by 1890.


Some of the biggest services in the world started off with really simple problems.


La Mã lúc đầu chỉ là 1 ngôi làng nhỏ làm nghề nông ven sông Tiber. Thời gian trôi qua, vùng này có thêm nhiều ngôi làng khác và cuối cùng các làng này kết hợp với nhau tạo ra 1 thành phố.


Ít ai biết rằng VNG xuất phát điểm là 1 quán game nhỏ dưới mô hình cafe internet. Sau đó, VNG phát triển thành 1 trong những công ty về công nghệ hàng đầu Việt Nam.


Detroit was once the symbol of progress, of what is good and possible. The auto industry was once the symbol of entrepreneurship. Now Detroit is the symbol of despair.


In the early years, on a number of occasions he mad the rather slow train trip to Barcelona to convince the manufacturers about the project he was developing. The tables have now completely turned, and the Inditex head office receives daily offers by dozens of suppliers prepared to do whatever it takes to work with the textile giant.


Despite their similar origins, Benetton pulled well ahead of Zara in their first few decades. Benetton appeared to have all the pieces in place for sustained growth, while Zara looked like a solid, but regional, player.


Rockefeller was a wholesale grocer in Cleveland when he first entered the oil business as a side pursuit in 1863.


Although today RM is closely associated with championships and was named “FIFA Club of the 20th century,” they were not a dominant team in the early years. RM won their first La Liga title almost 30 years after their founding.


Swissair went into liquidation in 2001. Once labeled “the flying bank” due to its profitability, the airline’s executive structure displayed groupthink traits, such as a sense of invulnerability.


Under normal circumstances, with his battlefield experience, promotion to brigadier general and intellectual brilliance, de Gaulle might have aspired to a top command in the army and, after another decade or so of service, perhaps to a position in the French cabinet. That he would, instead, emerge as the symbol of France itself was scarcely conceivable.


How much more disappointed he would have been to see the statues of the Queen-Empress and sundry imperial proconsuls that stand today in the neglected back yard of Lucknow Zoo, where they were dumped after Indian independence. There can be few more vivid emblems of the transience of imperial achievement than the immense marble Victoria that dominates this shabby little spot.


New technologies tend to come into the world in a very primitive condition, often designed for very specific problems. The steam engine was used as a nifty way to pump water out of mines long before it found its calling powering locomotives. Marconi sold radio as a means of ship-to-shore communications. Bell Labs was so underwhelmed by the commercial potential of the laser when it was invented in the ‘60s that it initially put off patenting it. Even the Internet was initially conceived as a way for scientists and academics to share research.


Về trí tuệ thì sự tình hoàn toàn khác. Nếu so trí tuệ của người NB với trí tuệ của người phương Tây thì về học vấn, kỹ thuật, thương mại, công nghiệp, từ việc lớn nhất đến việc nhỏ nhất, từ 1 đến 100, 1000… người NB chẳng có chỗ nào ưu việt hơn người phương Tây. Chẳng có hạng mục nào mà chúng ta có thể so sánh được với người phương Tây, và thậm chí còn chẳng có ai dám nghĩ đến chuyện so sánh với họ nữa.


Heretofore, gasoline had been an insignificant part of the output of the refining process, with some small value for solvents and as a fuel for stoves, but with little other use. In 1892, an oil man had congratulated himself for managing to sell gasoline for as much as 2 cents a gallon.


When Mubarak was arrested and put on trial, I felt very sorry for him. Video footage on TV news showed a gaunt and forlorn man, totally different from the impressive figure I had met in 1994.


In one of those absolutely delicious and yet tragic historical ironies, the Dutch traded the colony of New Amsterdam for Dutch Guinana. When that occurred in the 17th century, they were regarded as roughly equivalent properties. Today, of course, New York City is worth a couple of trillion dollars, while the capital of Suriname is among the most impoverished capitals in the Americas, a city of less than half a million people.


Bố mẹ Lee Hyori khi đó mở 1 tiệm cắt tóc rộng hơn 26m2. Không gian chật hẹp đó vừa là nơi kiếm sống vừa là chỗ ở cho cả 6 thành viên trong gia đình. Hoàn cảnh của cô bé Lee Hyori rất vất vả vì gia đình thuộc dạng nghèo khó.


Crueller than war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world.


The subject now was no longer the military menace of the USSR, but its growing weakness. Qian Qichen predicted the disintegration of the Soviet Union and described Beijing’s surprise when Gorbachev, on his visit in May, at the height of the Tiananmen demonstrations, asked China for economic assistance.


“Đó là điều bình thường đối với tôi, bởi vì tôi lớn lên trong chiến tranh. Nếu bạn nhìn thấy mọi người chết trên đường phố khi còn nhỏ, bạn sẽ hiểu rằng mọi thứ đều có thể thay đổi vào bất kì lúc nào.” Hàng năm, Ghodsi yêu cầu nhân viên của mình thực hiện luyện tập cho tình huống khẩn cấp, lập các kế hoạch hành động chi tiết trong trường hợp thị trường đã bị khai thác hết hoặc nền kinh tế tăng trưởng chậm lại.


He was painfully shy (Souvanrine recalled that he was “a timid, almost humble young man, very gentle, avid for learning”) that other participants dubbed him the “mute of Montmartre.”

On his first occasion, when he was called upon to describe the suffering of his compatriots under colonialism, Thanh was so nervous that he stuttered.


Các giáo viên tiếng Anh trong các trường đại học nhanh chóng kiếm được những công việc có thu nhập cao gấp hàng trăm lần so với lương trong ngành; ngược lại, bộ môn tiếng Nga gần như bị xoá sổ do không còn sinh viên đăng ký học.


10 years earlier, Samsung’s presence at CES was so small and insignificant that its booth was relegated to the far reaches of the conventional hall. But by 2009, it had the largest booth and was the talk of Las Vegas.


At the end of 1996, the 5 most valuable companies in the world were GE, Royal Dutch Shell, the Coca-Cola Company, NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone), and ExxonMobil — traditional industrial and consumer companies that relied on massive economies of scale and decades of branding to drive their value. Just 21 years later, the list looked very different: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.


In my youth the Italians in America were digging ditches; today Italians control the largest bank in the US. Consider the progress made by American Jews in the last half-century: in my youth I knew them as the harassed and impoverished people of the Lower East Side in New York; now I know their descendants as forming one of the numerous, affluent, and respected elements in Los Angeles. History does not forbid us to hope for a similar rise of our darker-skinned brothers and sisters. The melting pot still melts, though not so much by mingling bloods as by raising the level of education and the standard of life.


Three decades later, however, everything had changed. NY had seemed “glamorous” on Morita’s first visit in the 1950s. Now it was dirty, crime-ridden, and bankrupt.


The microprocessor market seemed almost certain to grow. But the prospect that microprocessor sales could overtake DRAMs, which constituted the bulk of chip sales, seemed mind-boggling.


A century after its foundation, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company makes Post-it notes. The world’s biggest mobile-phone company, Nokia, used to be in the paper business.


At first, the main attraction of Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, and Suzuki was price. But the 4 Japanese firms soon became the industry’s pioneers, introducing electric starters, 4-cylinder engines, and 5-speed transmissions, and launching new models every year. By 1981, Harley-Davidson had been forced to seek government protection, and the British motorcycle industry was to all intents and purposes dead.

This story seemed emblematic. In 1980, Chrysler, obliterated by better Japanese cars, lost $1.7B and had to be bailed out by the government. Sony and Matsushita had sewn up the consumer-electronics industry, and the Japanese had SV on the run.