Entrepreneurial Activity and American Economic Progress

It is to some extent heartening to know that economists are once again concerned with entrepreneurship and its role in economic life. Lest one be over- whelmed with joy, though, it is useful to recall that economists have toyed with this subject before, and with little enough direct impact upon the central body of economic thought as it is propagated by text and lecture from one generation of economists to the next. In the timeless equilibrium world of the professor’s blackboard, where institutional, political, social and technical change are usually absent, consumers, producers, buyers and sellers can all achieve satisfaction in effortless optimality, and the system rests. The role of individual persons in the processes of price and quantity change is either part of an abstraction or irrelevant.

Volume 3, Number 4 (1979)