13-2b The accumulated stock of capital goods imposes a conservative force on present-day action

Viz., the past, to some extent, influences the present.

Related:

• 9-4b2a1d A group of people who doesn’t know who they are and where they came from won’t make it to the moon or Mars

E.g.,

• Circa 2000, companies like Lucent, Nortel, and Global Crossing built real, world-class fiber-optic infrastructure. They claimed bandwidth demand would double annually and require constant infrastructure replacement. The fatal flaw: the fiber was too good—it lasted decades, not years (source).