Couldn’t agree more. It might sound dumb, but without bubbles, there’s no innovation. The wasteful spending is the price you pay for the next big thing. Fully agree with Colin Lewis:

Today, we face a similar wager with artificial intelligence. The question of whether we are overspending cannot be answered with balance sheets alone. It is a bet on our collective imagination. Reading Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber’s Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, one is struck by their central heresy: that bubbles, irrational, frenzied manias, are not pathologies but necessary accelerants of progress. Without them, they argue, stagnation hardens into a terminal condition.

The Heresy of the Productive Bubble

No rational cost-benefit analysis would have justified the Manhattan Project, which spent tens of billions in today’s money on an unproven physics experiment. Yet it transformed physics into geopolitics in three years. The Apollo Program was less an engineering inevitability than a collective hallucination funded by taxpayers underwriting an improbable vision. Both efforts were fueled by what Hobart and Huber call “reality-bending delusions”, the sort of thymos, or spirited drive, that civilization requires to escape entropy.

These were not just any bubbles. They were innovation-accelerating bubbles, phenomena that coordinate behavior, attract vast funding and talent, and enable the massive parallelization of innovation needed for transformative breakthroughs. They succeed because they foster a definite optimism about a specific, tangible future, creating a “reality distortion field” that makes the impossible seem achievable.