"If the left as a whole doesn't recoup before the elections on the basis of economic issues alone," Mr. Estévez said, "then they really have no chance of ever ruling".
But that doesn't recoup Weiss' initial investment, so he instead got his old friend to do him a favor.
Just as innovators do not fully recoup the social value to a country of new technologies, so countries do not recoup the social value to the rest of the world of their innovations.
The joint venture now operates in the black, but the companies did not recoup their original investments, and much of the infrastructure they built remains underused.
Ms. Choong gave Ms. Mitchell about $128,000 over two years; she did not recoup any of it, despite a promise of a full refund if her life did not improve.
"Time Stands Still," a drama last year about a war photographer (played by Laura Linney) adjusting to civilian life in Brooklyn, earned strong reviews but did not recoup the full capitalization for its commercial run.
In an article published on The Huffington Post on Monday, Mr. Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., wrote that "while the production did not recoup its full investment on Broadway, it did far better financially than I had planned".
His most recent success on Broadway was back in 1995, when "Sunset Boulevard" won seven Tonys, including for best musical, and ended up running for two and a half years — though it did not recoup its entire $13 million capitalization, a spokesman for Mr. Lloyd Webber said.
That show's multimillion-dollar profits notwithstanding, the last couple of years on Broadway have not been great for Mr. Mackintosh, what with underperforming shows like "Oklahoma!," which closed at a loss in February; "Putting It Together," which opened in 1999 and did not do well; and "Swan Lake," a 1998 critics' darling that did not recoup.
