This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 20th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Jamestown was first a horrible disaster and then a great success.

Rob McDonald is associate professor of history. disaster and then a great success.

Rob McDonald is associate professor of history at the United States Military Academy

and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute at Cato University earlier this year.

He described how the bad incentives at Jamestown nearly destroyed. earlier this We were really just kind of this loose band of colonies that had been planted on the eastern seaboard.

It's kind of a truism that the people who came to America from England, they came from different parts of England, they settled in different parts of America,

they came for different reasons. We know that the people who settled in Jamestown, for example, They came essentially to make money. Those people who settled in Plymouth, they came because they want to establish what one of their rulers would describe as a city on a hill, this great shining example of people

living a good and godly life in a new world that would be a beacon of hope and an example to

all the folks on the other side of the Atlantic.

We know that there were people in the middle, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, who were sort of a hybrid

of those two models.

The old adage is that a Quaker is someone who prays for you one day a week and

praise on you the other six.

Wiley business people, you know, very good at producing things.

So there's a great deal of diversity in colonial America, and it's always problematic to generalize.

And yet, the experiences of the settlers in Jamestown and Plymouth seem to illustrate a general

principle that should be of interest to all of us. Basically it's that incentives matter and that if you

don't get the incentives right the results can be disastrous. Now of course

before you have Jamestown in 1607 in Plymouth in 1620,

you have in the 1580s the attempt

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