Studying Entrepreneurs

4 January 2010 at 12:32 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Great opening from Robert Whaples’s EH.Net review of T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf, 2009):

Economists have always had a hard time dealing with entrepreneurs — as individuals and in the aggregate. We sort of know what entrepreneurship is and that it can have a profound impact on economic performance, but it’s usually just too difficult to model and measure. What we do not understand, we simply ignore and leave to others. After all, we are firm believers in comparative advantage and studying entrepreneurship — even if it is economically important — doesn’t seem to be our comparative advantage. In the view of most economic historians, it is the rules of the game — the incentives and the institutions — that really matter, not the players. American economic history has been cast as the story of millions of diligent and clever beavers working away and transforming the landscape. Take one of them away and nothing of great importance will really change. (In fact, most of us seem to believe that if you take away an entire technological complex, like the railroads, little of much importance would really change.)

Why, then, should economic historians study the careers of entrepreneurs? Not all of us should. But for some, the study of entrepreneurs will illuminate the past and the present — and put life into our cliometric narrative.

Joe Salerno has a valuable treatment of this problem in his 2008 paper “The Entrepreneur: Real and Imagined.”