“Investors neglected to do the simplest checking, and instead relied on a widespread belief that traffic takers’ demand projections had in almost all cases been substantially exceeded. This false belief arose from an intensive public relations campaign by the railway interest, supported by some scholarly studies. This campaign was based on diverting the public’s attention from the metrics for success that truly mattered, namely revenues and profits, to another one, namely the raw number of passengers … Any single one of these delusions was easily shown to be false. Hence one might think that with more opportunities to find fatal defects in the rosy profit projections, investors could not but wake up and realize they were being led astray. But that simply did not happen ... The multiple delusions, each easily falsifiable, reinforced each other and created a powerful collective hallucination that required a hard fall off a cliff to dispel.”
//Andrew Odlyzko
//Andrew Odlyzko
