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From:
[log in to unmask] (Mohammad Gani)
Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:36 2006
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----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
   Schumpeter was standing on a very uncertain and undefined fault line with his theory of
entrepreneurship which would feed into a theory of development. His work did not inspire
the mainstream neoclassical readers because he did not provide much formal analysis.
   Nor did he reach the high level of logical abstraction favored by verbalizers of the
Austrian School tradition, which Schumpeter knew well. He did not expose the inherent
antagonism, nor did he make peace between one camp that had the form without substance
(Solow, Lucas), and the other that had the substance without the form (Mises).
 
   The facts of entrepreneurship were never in doubt, and the classical authors,
especially J B Say looked keenly at entrepreneurship. Why then did Baumol (AER 1968)
lament that entrepreneurship had disappeared from neoclassical economics?  The
contribution of Mises (Human Action 1949) and Kirzner (Competition and Entrepreneurship
1973) do not provide the kind of formal treatment required by the  mainstream. Despite
Baumol's own formal contribution, entrepreneurship still remains theoretically unknown to
economics in formal models.
   Nobody has shown how to formally derive pure profit in equilibrium by busting the
budget constraint, how to get something for nothing. It is easy to do so in an input-
output model.
 
   Here is the problem. Mainstream neoclassical economics studies the allocation of
existing wealth (budget, endowment) and has just no room for entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship essentially consists of creation of new wealth that does not already
exist, and it does so by  breaking the budget constraints. An entrepreneur is most
absolutely not an optimizer, and no concept of budget can apply to it.
 
   How may one study entrepreneurship? One can, if one takes a Leontief-type input-output
model, permits sellers to sell at prices above marginal cost of production, and introduce
new knowledge and turn it into value-added. For such a model to succeed, it is necessary
to explain not just why self-appointed intermediaries appear in the market (who do not
produce, but sell, and who do not consume but buy), but also why ordinary people
(producers. consumers) sell to and buy from middlemen. One must show that transaction cost
is the other side of entrepreneurship; that the entrepreneurs cut down transaction costs
which ordinary producers and consumers cannot achieve. This role is far more complex than
innovation and creative destruction. It involves the creation of market institutions
(legitimization), organizations (Coase), use of dispersed information (Hayek) and
innovation/discovery (Schumpeter, Mises, Kirzner).
 
   A creative destruction of the empty mathematics and some analytical innovation is
needed to take economics to the next advanced state.
 
 
   Mohammad Gani 
  
 
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