No wonder governments can't pick industrial winners 

The Xerox Corp. headquarters in Norwalk, C.T., U.S. Photo by Michael Nagle/Bloomberg files

There’s an old joke that if you want to get rich quick, the easiest way is to buy Xerox in 1952. Younger readers may require an explanation. In 1959, Xerox introduced the first “plain-paper photocopier.” Paper was a thing we used to have that you scratched images on with graphite sticks or dark fluids and filed away. Tens of thousands of people made livings as “file clerks.” Having an exact copy of something you’d written was often handy. So the technology that did that was very valuable. And Xerox was so on top of the technology that for a time photocopies were actually called “xeroxes.” This was all before the time when everything ever written could be stored on a few hundred hunks of humming me