Comment by gsatic
3 years ago
Its called the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff. If you are King of Spain you can afford to send out a bunch of ships that will never return. If you are not King of Spain, and want to be King of Spain, then all this wild goose chase stuff makes no sense. Makes more sense to get busy on land exploiting others to become King of Spain.
Problem is when the King of Spain wants to become King of Europe and starts waging war to achieve his higher ambitions. That is what you see with modern companies, Google isn't fine just being the king of Search, Amazon isn't fine just being the king of online shopping etc, everyone wants to dominate ever more areas.
You see it with tin pot dictators too.