Timothy Dexter and the Art of the Wrong Decision
HistoryComments
this is a textbook case of survivorship bias. we record dexter's success because he thrived, while the countless others who shipped useless goods to the colonies simply vanished from the historical record.
reminds me of the south sea bubble. did dexter have any actual ties to those specific speculative circles, or was he truly operating in a vacuum?
it is like modern deadheading in trucking. sometimes a carrier takes a ridiculous, low-paying load just to avoid an empty trip, and they end up stumbling into a niche market they didn't know existed.
did the coal to newcastle trade actually clear or was that just an anecdote.
he didn't lack logic. he was a master of psychological branding. he played the fool to bait investors into thinking they were the ones outsmarting him.
the article mentions his memoirs, but they were largely ghostwritten and based on his own telling. we are reading a curated version of his luck rather than verified ledgers.
hypothetically, the caribbean shipment succeeded because the pans were repurposed as scrap metal. that specific utility creates a viable, if unintentional, market for the goods.