Entrepreneur Zones: Teaching People To Fish In America’s Abundantly Stocked Economic River.

Entrepreneurship has not been valued the way it should be.

Sure, we read about and hear about the outliers of venture-capital funded unicorns, and the spectacular wealth of entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. But the most important entrepreneurship is represented by the tens of millions of so-called small businesses in the US. As a group, these businesses are the biggest employers (over 99% of employer companies are small businesses) and the leading job creators. They are the energy and dynamism of our economy. They have made the US into the richest country in the world. More critically, small business entrepreneurs provide the economic backbone of cities and local economies, providing the employment, income, and prosperity that make for thriving families, neighborhoods, and communities. Entrepreneurship is not only the foundation of a strong economy, it’s the best generator of social improvement.

Dr. Dale G. Caldwell of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Rothman Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is an expert on the impact of entrepreneurship on social improvement, both in the US and worldwide. He has applied his analysis of entrepreneurship data to create an entirely new set of entrepreneurship policy initiatives.

“The quickest way to turn around low-income communities is to create new jobs that provide previously poor households with the income they need to pay their monthly bills on time”, he states in a white paper. The most effective way to create the jobs is to provide the tax incentives, regulation relief, and financial support that local entrepreneurs need to help them increase profitability and employment in the local community.

To implement such a policy, Dr. Caldwell introduces the idea of Entrepreneur Zones. These are designated areas within urban neighborhoods with the highest joblessness rates, where an increase in successful new businesses can significantly increase local employment, providing the jobs that local residents need to work their way out of poverty. Dr. Caldwell has outlined principles of legislation that would provide for lower state and local business taxes and relaxed state regulations for businesses located in Entrepreneur Zones and employing local residents. The businesses would receive tax credits based on the number of new employees they hire who live locally.

These businesses also need to be investable – they must be able to attract and accumulate the capital that supports growth and success. Dr. Caldwell suggests that lenders and investors receive favorable tax treatment for loans and investments provided directly to Entrepreneur Zone businesses. Governments could make these financial investments attractive by providing tax credits or possibly tax deductions similar to those received for contributions to nonprofits.

Most decidedly, Dr. Caldwell’s proposal is not welfare. In fact, it could be construed as counter-welfare. He points to “safety net” programs like free and reduced price lunch programs and temporary income and housing support that are “band-aids” but do not lead to the elimination of the educational achievement gap that means that kids who eat better at school and go home to federally-subsidized housing still end up living in poverty when they are adults.

But if programs can “teach a person to fish”, they can break the cycle of systemic poverty. Research has indicated that children who live in communities with high levels of poverty have weaker neural connections in their brain, affecting judgment and ethical and emotional behavior. They may have difficulty focusing, communicating effectively and making good decisions about work, school and life. Dr. Caldwell calls this condition Urban Traumatic Stress Disorder (“UTSD”), drawing the parallel with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder experienced by soldiers after serving in war zones.

Entrepreneur Zones would avoid the problem of welfare that traps people in multi-generational poverty and contributes to UTSD. Rather than a safety net, they would be a trampoline, enabling people to bounce up into society to become productive, financially independent citizens. Importantly, Dr. Caldwell’s program focuses on household income, which is more important than the hourly wages of individuals in determining real poverty. The creation of additional jobs via entrepreneurship will reduce poverty even if there is no increase in the minimum hourly wage. Dr. Caldwell cites study data demonstrating that the household living wage index (LWI) can predict improved academic performance in school, the reduction of crime, and lower health care costs.

Entrepreneur Zones are a highly targeted, highly specific solution to the problem of urban poverty. The “Empowerment Zones” of the 1990’s were unsuccessful because of weak investment incentives and a lack of focus on creating jobs and supporting entrepreneurs. The “Opportunity Zones” created in the 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act are aimed at spurring real estate investment, not entrepreneurial businesses in poor communities. Entrepreneur Zones build on past learning to craft a better program design.

Dr. Caldwell has originated a whole new policy pathway: entrepreneurship policy. Job creation is the most effective social program, and job creation is what entrepreneurs do. We are reminded that Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963 was actually called the March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom. It was economic activism, as well as political and social activism. Economic activism – teaching more people how to fish in America’s rapidly flowing and abundantly stocked economic river – can be more productive on more fronts than protest, social justice campaigning or welfare legislation.

An Economist Uncovers A New Market Trend: The Rise of the DIY Consumer-Entrepreneur.

[postintro]This article continues the occasional series from Professor Raushan Gross on The Institutions Of Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a powerful pathway to innovation, growth, prosperity, and a better life for all. Its emergence and thriving are not automatic; it requires enabling institutions. Professor Gross will analyze and explain the institutional supports required for entrepreneurship to play its role in elevating society to the highest levels of achievement.[/postintro]

Marginal and well-meaning small businesses are leaving the marketplace in droves during the COVID economy. Many consumers want to patronize these businesses, but the current economic situation calls for consumers to adjust and make trade-offs in their consumption patterns. The inability of small businesses to offer services and products due to COVID may well lead consumers to take on a new role in the marketplace – as consumer-entrepreneur.

The economic situation poses new realities regarding how the COVID transformation has and will affect consumers’ thinking about service and product acquisitions in the long run. The marketplace may shift as an unintended consequence of consumers’ changed attitudes. Yes, there are digital options, but there is an array of services that are not in a digitized format, especially some service-oriented acquisitions such as hairstyles and cuts, dental work, cosmetics, vehicle maintenance, and the like. The products and or services that consumers have historically received from small businesses in the past will, in many cases, be no longer be available. These market changes must alter consumer actions regarding product and service acquisitions in a far-reaching way that we have yet to see.

The immediate effects of the COVID economy are small business closures and the pivot to online acquisition of economic goods and digital services. However, we often do not consider the long-run effects that are not yet visible based on the change in customers’ behavior as they decide how to adjust to the fact that fewer options are available. To this point, Thomas Sowell once said that people are not blocks of wood, they react to changes in ways never intended.

The DIY entrepreneur-consumer uses their own human capital, skills, resources, and networks through the use of social and digital platforms to bring to market their creations.  Simply, the consumer-entrepreneur is an individual who produces the end product or service themselves and sells their products to other consumers in a consumer-to-consumer marketplace. Not that all DIY options are the best or worst, but it is a manifestation given the consumers’ choices under the COVID market phenomena. Simply, people respond to changes in the market.

Many consumers have experienced a market transition in which doing projects themselves – to produce products and services which they would have had to search for and find in the marketplace – has its advantages,. While many small business owners experienced the adverse effects of the COVID economy on the existing marketplace, consumers have found ways of doing things themselves and providing their services to others in an emerging consumer-to-consumer marketplace – C2C. The visible effect of COVID is fewer and fewer small business providers in the marketplace, but the invisible secondary effect is that this dissipation creates a consumer-entrepreneurial culture. Consumer to Consumer (C2C) is a marketplace ecosystem where individual consumers sell to and buy from other consumers.

There is no doubt that the horn of plenty for at-home consumption via digital products and platforms has fulfilled want-satisfaction, but there are some services where consumers must take part in their acquisition. Surely consumers can order most products online and download digital products and some digital services, but what about the services where the acquiring consumer must play an active part in its consumption? People would love to have dental work performed virtually, it would save the pain of a real visit, but this is not a service that one can accomplish (DIY) at home. Another example: I cannot get a hair styled or cut virtually, but I can do it myself in the comfort of my own home. I cannot get my car oil changed if my mechanic closes his doors. I guess I can do it myself.

If we look past the immediate benefits of our digitized consumption and think about the secondary effects of digital consumption, there is a significant additional array of consumers’ choices, particularly their choice to DIY and engage in entrepreneurship. Whether consumer-entrepreneurship is good or not so good, we do not know. Optimistically speaking, individuals who never thought of DIY-ing themselves and becoming a consumer-entrepreneur can now reap the benefits of the digital marketplace.

The simple fact is that if my mechanic closes his shop, I will have to maintain my vehicle myself. If my barber closes his business, I will have to style and cut my hair myself, which will not look the best, but the alternative is untenable. The short-run visible effects are the number of technological platforms that will allow consumers to DIY and e-commerce platforms to engage in consumer-to-consumer exchanges for their want-satisfaction, leading to an increasing number of consumer-entrepreneurs. The long-run effect is that consumers will have a new role in the future market economy which we have not intended – the DIY consumer-entrepreneur.

In the long-run, small businesses decrease their market presence, allowing more consumers to become more productive in satisfying their own wants and those of others, which creates a robust (C2C) marketplace. The immediate effect will be to show that consumers are creative and can be entrepreneurial. In the long-run, will consumers make these timely trade-offs between their leisure and production and overcome the disutility of their labor to DIY their services and produce goods for themselves and others in the (C2C) marketplace? Only time will tell if the COVID economic impact has a lasting effect on consumers’ ability and willingness to increase consumer-entrepreneurship.

 

Raushan Gross, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Business Management at Pfeiffer University.

94. Peter Klein on the Advantaged Business Insights of the Austrian School

Six ways — selected from many — that businesspeople can derive more insightful knowledge and perspective from Austrian economics than from traditional Business School teaching.

Download The Episode Resource A-School vs. B-School – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

More Human

Austrians believe in business as an uplifting human endeavor, focused on how people as producers can best help people as customers to do well, feel better, and thrive. To do so, entrepreneurs cultivate their power of empathy: to understand others, feel what they feel, and understand their hopes and dreams. Entrepreneurs utilize this understanding to cultivate new ideas, design new solutions, and present new value propositions for customers’ consideration. It’s the human project.

When business schools approach business building as an engineering problem, to design and run an assembly of operating machinery — whether physical or digital – at maximum levels of efficiency, and to manage via mathematical models embedded in spreadsheets and software, they occlude the human factor.

More Subjective

Emotion and subjectivity are important elements of human decision-making, both for producers and customers. Data and so-called rationality are important, but how people feel, how they perceive, how they interact, and how they subjectively weigh up options are dominant in shaping decisions. Austrians understand this, especially in the subjective imagination entrepreneurs apply to future customers and their potential preferences. No data or predictive models can reproduce this capability.

More Individual

Austrian economics always starts analysis at the individual level. Every economic phenomenon can be traced back to one buyer exchanging with one seller. What are the motivations and incentives and processes that promote the completion of the exchange? What are the barriers that might prevent it? Can the resulting knowledge be applied in more instances, and even at scale?

Austrians are not atomists. We understand — more deeply, perhaps, than the minds behind the business school disciplines — interconnection, community, and the interaction of individual beliefs, values, and preferences. It is the study of these interactions that lies at the core of the Austrian approach to business. Groups and segments are abstractions — only individuals decide, choose, and act.

And today, technology is moving in our direction, enabling more fine-grained action to reach individual customers with tailored value propositions.

More Imaginative

Professor Peter Klein has been, and continues to be, a leader in unwrapping the role of entrepreneurial imagination in the dynamism of business. He emphasizes that humans are fundamentally creative actors, and that entrepreneurs apply imagination to create new possibilities, new solutions, and new combinations of resources the world has never before seen. Opportunities are not “out there” to be discovered. They’re imagined by the entrepreneur.

Yes, there can be planning, e.g. in the choices between alternative patterns of resource allocation. But even these are subjective, based on individual entrepreneurial assessments. There can be projection of trends, although empathy with future customers is a counterweight to projection. Overall, imagination dominates.

More Action-Oriented

As Peter Klein also teaches, entrepreneurship is characterized by acting to reap the rewards inherent in imagined possibility. This action orientation makes the Austrian approach to business much more realistic and straightforward than the business schools’ insistence on the mysteries and opacity of strategy.

Austrian entrepreneurs form their own beliefs, act on them, and gather the results. The results are a feedback mechanism, energizing the entrepreneur to make adjustments and try again. Business is very straightforward. The Austrian action-orientation to business is empowering and inspiring.

A Role for Theory

Professor Klein told the story of his first foray into executive education. He was nervous about presenting Austrian economic theory to experienced and successful business people. He quickly learned that theory is what business needs and what traditional business instruction lacks. Managers often know everything about their industry, but do not always have theoretical perspective, or frameworks to help them see the forest and not just the trees. Without a theory, all they have is a mess of data.

Theory provides a path to interpretation. That’s what’s so valuable about Austrian economics: it emphasizes theory. One example we discussed for business was pricing theory. Austrian economics provides a pathway for entrepreneurs to map out how pricing for specific goods and services emerges via the interplay of customer preferences and context with entrepreneurs’ value propositions. The price that is right for an exchange can be discovered by following this pathway.

But the entrepreneur still needs to combine the theory with action and experience: set the price for an offering, and test the customer’s willingness to pay in the context of all their alternatives and their previous experiences. Theory provides an invaluable generalized assistance with understanding of the customer’s ultimate decision, but can’t predict the contingencies of the moment and of the individual’s idiosyncratic personal situation. With Austrian theory, an entrepreneur is more likely to get pricing “right” (via theory) but not every time (that’s experience).

Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode

“Austrian School vs. Business School” (PDF): Get It Here

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

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93. Ramon Ray’s Entrepreneurial Communities

“Small business” is just a government classification. Entrepreneurial businesses serving well-defined communities via creative specialization exhibit enormous economic productivity, energy and dynamism.

Such businesses can not be defined quantitatively as small, medium or large. They’re defined by their qualitative impact on their customers’ lives.

Download The Episode Resource Ramon Ray’s Entrepreneurial Communities – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Entrepreneurial businesses care differently, and care more.

Big businesses must pay attention to size and scale, to their huge revenue and profit streams, to their many, many shareholders, to journalists and bureaucrats and financial analysts. They are, typically, managing to maintain progress or status on a well-established pathway, and have limited time and resources to devote to customer care.

The triple-option of the entrepreneur.

Small businesses are designed and constructed to care for customers and communities. As Ramon Ray puts it, small business entrepreneurs choose to:

  • Create what we want;
  • Serve whom we want;
  • Collaborate with whom we want.

As a consequence, business owners care differently about their customers, their colleagues, and their collaborators and partners.

Small business entrepreneurs create communities of fans.

Ramon sees small business owners serving their chosen communities as Celebrity CEOs. This does not require millions of Twitter followers or a pack of paparazzi. It results from being known and trusted as the specialist supplier of a highly desired service personalized to a well-chosen, often local, customer base. It’s the deli owner with the best sandwiches, or the mechanic to whom to trust one’s 1958 Edsel.

Customers become fans, deeply emotionally bonded to the entrepreneur and the service. Business owners become more deeply intimate with customers-as-fans, and the synergy is complete and lasting. The entrepreneur and the firm come to fit the community perfectly, and become indispensable.

The well-served community is a qualitative measure of business success, not quantitative.

Ramon Ray aims to build a community of entrepreneurs along similar lines of helping and caring.

Entrepreneurs can thrive by serving well-chosen communities, and they can also thrive by being part of a community. His vehicle is a B-corp formed by fellow-entrepreneur Seth Godin, to support small business entrepreneurs. Akimbo provides knowledge, tools, and courses to help entrepreneurs run and grow a business. Ramon’s latest contribution is a series called Small Business Essentials, a workshop in 12 modules. The modules cover essentials including pricing, cash flow, and hiring, as well as entrepreneurial refinements such as properly defining what problem you are solving and who are you solving it for.

A special feature of the workshop is that participants are joined online by fellow entrepreneurs, so that there is a group experience, group knowledge sharing, and group Q&A. The community helps itself by helping each other. It’s a place to learn and a place to ask questions.

Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode

“Celebrity CEO Mindset” (PDF): Get It Here

Ramon Ray’s “Small Business Essentials” Workshop: Check It Out Here

Ramon Ray’s book, The Celebrity CEO: How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive by Building a Community and a Strong Personal Brand: Get It Here

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

Enjoying The Podcast? Review, Subscribe & Listen On Your Favorite Platform:

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Unsure Of Your Direction In These Turbulent Times? Entrepreneurship Can Provide All The Answers You Need.

2020 has been a strange year. My friend Ben always asks me, “Is the world crazy enough for you today?”  He knows I nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and he likes to challenge me: there’s too much uncertainty in 2020 even for those who typically embrace it, which is a good definition of entrepreneurs.

But, in fact, entrepreneurship is the answer in crazy times. Here are several reasons why.

Entrepreneurs are independent.

In times of turbulence, whether economic or political, global, national or local, many people can get confused. They’re not sure what to think, and they find it difficult to sort through competing claims or conflicting evidence. They look for the reassurance of someone else’s opinion to latch onto.

That’s not the case with entrepreneurs. They are independent thinkers. They rigorously seek cause-and-effect where it can be found, but they are also keenly aware that complex systems – when shocked with a pandemic, a disputed election, civil unrest, zero and even negative interest rates, significant changes in shopping and travel habits – can exhibit unpredictable and unstable emergent properties.

Entrepreneurs apply their own judgment based on the information that’s available to them and the insight that’s unique to them; they make a decision; and then they test it against reality by implementing it and adapting based on the results that come back. Independent thinkers are society’s best resource amidst turmoil.

Entrepreneurs are non-ideological.

It sometimes appears that we are suffering through a clash of ideologies, whether social or political or economic. Ideologies tend to be rigid and unrelenting, and those who hold one see opponents in anyone who holds another. Ideologies are not useful to entrepreneurs, and so they don’t include them in their assembly of resources. Ideological rigidity doesn’t mix with the pragmatism and adaptiveness that are keys to entrepreneurial thriving.

A non-ideological world sounds very attractive right now.

Entrepreneurs have no time for identity politics and political correctness.

Entrepreneurs are typically pursuing a finite goal with a finite amount of resources. They need the best people they can recruit to join their team, they need clarity of communication and a shared mission. The last thing in the world they have any time for is worrying about the political correctness of a choice or of a statement. They’ll listen to legitimate market preferences of course, but they won’t be distracted by meaningless noise. entrepreneurs don’t lie bout equality or unity. They assemble diverse teams – where the diversity comes from complementary competencies not divisive demographic distinctions – and they judge on passion for the task, performance, and results. 

Entrepreneurs are non-compliant.

A consequence of the pandemic is that a portion of the population has been beaten down into a state of compliance by authorities wielding mandates. Compliance is undesirable behavior when it is viewed through the entrepreneurial lens of innovation, betterment and economic growth.

We’re all better off when there is non-compliance: when Uber refuses to comply with the mandates n favor of taxis, or when AirBnB refuses to comply with pro-hotel mandates, or when medical researchers defy those who want to constrain experimentation and progress. Non-compliance is the right stance for society, and entrepreneurs can be counted upon to take it.

Entrepreneurs hold to the ethic of service.

In our current conflicted world, capitalism is condemned by some as exploitative and even evil. Some critics see profits that they deem to be extreme and extractive of the value that workers create, others see pollution and environmental damage. They are totally wrong and completely misguided.

The ethic of entrepreneurial capitalism is to serve others. The entrepreneurial market works when producers identify unmet needs and wants among their fellow-citizens who seek betterment and improvement. Multiple entrepreneurs compete to be the one chosen by consumers to meet that need, rivaling each other to come up with the highest quality / lowest cost solution. The ethic of entrepreneurial service has raised living standards across the globe and lifted billions out of poverty.

Keeping entrepreneurs unleashed will generate more and faster improvements in the future.

Entrepreneurs believe in liberty and property.

Entrepreneurship thrives only in favorable market conditions, with the right supportive institutions. The most important of the institutions is the legal framework to make it easy to start new ventures, favors innovation (Professor Michael Munger of Duke University calls the framework permissionless innovation), and imposes as few stifling regulations as possible, so that otherwise unrealized innovation is set free. Overall, we can think of the institutions of entrepreneurship as liberty – freeing creative minds and brilliant engineers and operators to follow their purpose to wherever it takes them in the pursuit of the profit that comes from consumer approval.

The second major institution of entrepreneurship is property. Entrepreneurs stake their own property in a bet that their business can succeed and grow. They take risks with their own property – and therefore need to operate in a framework that respects private property and their right to do with it whatever they will. When private property is restricted, limited, over-taxed, over-regulated or confiscated, entrepreneurship can’t thrive.

Liberty and property together are the institutions of entrepreneurship. 

Entrepreneurship Yields Meaning And Purpose.

At the bottom line, we all seek meaning and purpose in life. Meaning refers to our framing of the difference an individual wants to make in the world, the feeling that one’s endeavors are worthwhile. Purpose refers to the specific goal the individual pursues as in making that difference.

Researchers John Bitzan and Clay Routledge of The Challey Institute have documented, based on deep research, how individuals’ belief in the free working of the entrepreneurial marketplace provides them with the sense of meaning and purpose they seek. Bitzan and Routledge call this feeling “individual agency” – the feeling of being free to act and capable of meaningful achievement in the institutional context of capitalism and free markets. Individual agency is the central idea of entrepreneurship.

What’s The Ideal Age To Be An Entrepreneur? Let Market Conditions Decide.

[postintro]This is the first article in an occasional series from Professor Raushan Gross on The Institutions Of Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a powerful pathway to innovation, growth, prosperity, and a better life for all. Its emergence and thriving are not automatic; it requires enabling institutions. Professor Gross will analyze and explain the institutional supports required for entrepreneurship to play its role in elevating society to the highest levels of achievement.[/postintro]

The condition of the market economy is the most critical aspect of entrepreneurs’ success, not the entrepreneur’s age. Yet, who say the opposite; that there is a Golden Age of entrepreneurial success, and it is 45. The combination of the age of the entrepreneur and the right mindset is said to be the perfect formula for market success.

While I agree that everything takes time, I am not convinced that age and mindset are essential for successful entrepreneurial endeavors in the long run. Although age and mindset have a role in success, we cannot disregard the requisite market conditions that are more likely to produce favorable or unfavorable results regardless of age and mindset. Entrepreneurs need a favorable market that rewards their risk-taking. If would-be entrepreneurs who are not in their Golden Age today are advised to wait to see success when they enter their 40’s even under unfavorable market conditions, we are in danger of eliminating one of the economy’s critical functions – entrepreneurship itself.

Conventional thinking about entrepreneurship is changing before our very eyes. For example, there have been significant declines in small business ownership and new startups, and fewer unicorns decade over decade. Why? Let us say that Rome was not built overnight, and neither was the entrepreneur. Products take time to produce; it takes time to develop a network of customers; it takes time for the entrepreneur to develop awareness, it takes time to find the market error that can be turned into an opportunity, and finally, it takes time for the market to adjust to changes in consumers’ tastes, preferences, and perceptions. Entrepreneurs do not acquire human capital in just one day, nor were economic systems created in one day.

Entrepreneurship is a social phenomenon that manifests itself through the passing of time, and application of human energy and capital, and favorable market conditions. No group of persons sat around one day and created our market economy; it took vast amounts of experiences and knowledge to come together, creating a space for the entrepreneurial function to operate for us. If the Golden Age is 45, and there have been declines in new entrepreneurial births, who will the newcomers follow? How will the ranks fill with those who can imitate the paths of successful entrepreneurs or small business owners?

The favorable conditions of a market economy are essential so that an individual at any age can find and pursue meaning in life. The benefit of favorable market conditions is to allow would-be entrepreneurs to find meaningful ways of applying their human capital to serve society’s most urgent needs, making conditions better for both others and themselves. The market provides a means by which one entrepreneur pursuing their own aims can enable someone else with whom they have no direct contact to pursue their own goals. In other words, productivity begets productivity.  Another benefit of a favorable market economy is that it brings forth visible adjustments, errors, new knowledge, and information, against which entrepreneurs can weigh their subjective opportunity costs in assessing the risk of pursuing a possible opportunity.1

In essence, individuals accumulate entrepreneurial skills and opportunity awareness, but they have to act to put them to practical use, and if they cannot, society pays the costs. The costs amount to a decrease in new entrepreneurship, innovations, and knowledge. People pursue endeavors when they are incentivized to do so, and if they are not it will leave a gap in one of the most critical market functions – entrepreneurship. Rome was built through the experiences and knowledge set in motion by many people over time. F. A. Hayek stated:

“the successful combination of knowledge and aptitude is not selected by common deliberation, by people seeking a solution to their problems through joint effort; it is the product of individuals imitating those who have been more successful and from their being guided by signs or symbols, such as prices offered for their products or expressions of moral or aesthetic esteem for their having observed standards of conduct –in short, of their using the results of the experiences of others.” 2

An open economic system, where individuals of all ages (younger, older, and in between) are encouraged to pursue their economic interest considering their subjective opportunity costs, ipso facto is likely to increase new entrepreneurial births. Therefore, the condition of the market economy is a necessary factor for entrepreneurs to maximize their range of choices and ideas, and to discover and innovate. A favorable economic system provides individuals in a society a way to use their human capital to achieve society’s needs, on behalf of people they will never know directly.

Certainly, age and experience play to the entrepreneur’s advantage, but what matters most is the market economy’s conditions.

How will people who are not at the Golden Age react to the current market conditions? They need a measurable market indicator – others’ success. Who will fill the shoes of the entrepreneurs and small business owners who have vanished? We must remember that Rome was not built overnight, and neither was the entrepreneur and the system in which they operate.

 

[1] Kirzner, I. M. (2015). Austrian Subjectivism & the Emergence of Entrepreneurship Theory. Liberty: Indianapolis, ID.

[2] Hayek, F. A. (2020). The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

 

Raushan Gross, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Business Management at Pfeiffer University.