Organizations and Markets

The Beauty of Entrepreneurship

24 July 2008 at 9:34 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Entrepreneurship is exciting, important, dynamic, unpredictable, creative, the “driving force” of the market economy, in Mises’s words. But is it beautiful? Yes, writes Evan Osborne in the new issue of the excellent Independent Review:

Commerce deserves a place next to literature, poetry, painting, music, and other conventional forms of art as an arena for human expression and a potential source of beauty. To expand the limits of human possibilities, entrepreneurs attempt to create value by rearranging scarce resources, and the methods they employ in these endeavors exhibit such dimensions of beauty as proportion, symmetry, and harmony.

The online edition of the article, “Commerce is Beautiful,” is behind a six-month moving wall but you can read the working-paper version here. It’s worth nothing that mathematics, another field not normally associated with the fine arts, also uses aesthetic terms like elegant, deep, austere, and beautiful to describe its achievements.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Entrepreneurship.