The Entrepreneur in Economics

Current economic research denies the innate characteristics of the entrepreneur. Rather than attributing economic growth and innovation to personality traits, economists would rather advocate a form of economic determinism: if an aggressive personality dominated an industry, economists try to explain the characteristics of the industry that made aggression a successful strategy. Economic models are contrived to remove the personality from the entrepreneur, to make all entrepreneurial decisions predestined, given enough time. However, to deny Bill Gates's or Steve Jobs's role in economic history is equivalent to denying Hitler's role in creating a Nazi Germany or Castro's role in creating a Communist Cuba. Claiming that history or economics is deterministic is silly. Entrepreneurs are people who make decisions; their decisions need not fall out of dry economic models, just as no literary model could predict the words of Shakespeare and no historical model could predict the future. However, we must be systematic in our approach to identifying entrepreneurial characteristics and not fatuously assert that entrepreneurs drive economic change. Instead, we must link specific entrepreneurial tasks to