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price of complements, or goods that are used together. When the price of gasoline rises, the demand for cars
falls.
Entrepreneurship
By Mark Casson
The term "entrepreneur", which most people recognize as meaning someone who organizes and assumes
the risk of a business in return for the profits, appears to have been introduced by Richard Cantillon (1697 –
1734), an Irish economist of French descent. The term came into much wider use after John Stuart Mill popu-
larized it in his 1848 classic, "Principles of Political Economy", but then all but disappeared from the econom-
ics literature by the end of the nineteenth century.
The reason is simple. In their mathematical models of economic activity and behavior, economists began to
use the simplifying assumption that all people in an economy have perfect information. That leaves no role for
the entrepreneur. Although different economists have emphasized different facets of entrepreneurship, all
economists who have written about it agree that at its core entrepreneurship involves judgment. But if people
have perfect information, there is no need for judgment. Fortunately, economists have increasingly dropped the
assumption of perfect information in recent years. As this trend continues, economists are likely to allow in
their models for the role of the entrepreneur. When they do, they can learn from past economists, who took en-
trepreneurship more seriously.
According to Cantillon's original formulation, the entrepreneur is a specialist in taking on risk. He "insures"
workers by buying their products (or their labor services) for resale before consumers have indicated how much
they are willing to pay for them. The workers receive an assured income (in the short run, at least), while the
entrepreneur bears the risk caused by price fluctuations in consumer markets.
This idea was refined by the U.S. economist Frank H. Knight (1885 –1972), who distinguished between
risk, which is insurable, and uncertainty, which is not. Risk relates to recurring events whose relative frequency
is known from past experience, while uncertainty relates to unique events whose probability can only be subjec-
tively estimated. Changes affecting the marketing of consumer products generally fall in the uncertainty cate-
gory. Individual tastes, for example, are affected by group culture, which, in turn, depends on fashion trends
that are essentially unique. Insurance companies exploit the law of large numbers to reduce the overall burden
of risks by "pooling" them. For instance, no one knows whether any individual forty-year-old will die in the
next year. But insurance companies do know with relative certainty how many forty-year-olds in a large group
will die within a year. Armed with this knowledge, they know what price to charge for life insurance, but they
cannot do the same when it comes to uncertainties. Knight observed that while the entrepreneur can "lay off"
risks much like insurance companies do, he is left to bear the uncertainties himself. He is content to do this be-
cause his profit compensates him for the psychological cost involved.
If new companies are free to enter an industry and existing companies are free to exit, then in the long run
entrepreneurs and capital will exit from industries where profits are low and enter ones where they are high. If
uncertainties were equal between industries, this shift of entrepreneurs and of capital would occur until profits
were equal in each industry. Any long-run differences in industry profit rates, therefore, can be explained by the
different magnitudes of the uncertainties involved.
Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883 – 1950) took a different approach, emphasizing the role of innovation. Ac-
cording to Schumpeter, the entrepreneur is someone who carries out "new combinations" by such things as in-
troducing new products or processes, identifying new export markets or sources of supply, or creating new
types of organization. Schumpeter presented a heroic vision of the entrepreneur as someone motivated by the
"dream and the will to found a private kingdom"; the "will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself
superior to others"; and the "joy of creating".
In Schumpeter's view the entrepreneur leads the way in creating new industries, which, in turn, precipitate
major structural changes in the economy. Old industries are rendered obsolete by a process of "creative destruc-
tion." As the new industries compete with established ones for labor, materials, and investment goods, they
drive up the price of these resources. The old industries cannot pass on their higher costs because demand is
switching to new products. As the old industries decline, the new ones expand because imitators, with optimis-
tic profit expectations based on the innovator's initial success, continue to invest. Eventually, overcapacity de-
presses profits and halts investment. The economy goes into depression, and innovation stops. Invention con-
tinues, however, and eventually there is a sufficient stock of unexploited inventions to encourage courageous
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