Entrepreneurship and the Market Process --- NYC edition

|Peter Boettke|

Ed Glaeser has a nice discussion in the City Journal on the critical role that entrepreneurs have played in the history of NYC, and what role they still have to play in the transformation of the world's greatest city (in my humble opinion).  I disagree with Glaeser to some extent about the public policy to encourage entrepreneurship, but I think his discussion in general overwhelms those few paragraphs.  I wish more of us who are influenced by Kirzner would do more historical work along these lines.  Jonathan Hughes The Vital Few is another example of the type of work that students of Schumpeter, Mises, Hayek and Kirzner could be engaged in as a viable research program.  Analytical history is social science, and the theory of the entrepreneurial market process is one important slice of the analytical framework.

A survey of the literature on entrepreneurship and institutions can be found in Chris Coyne and my monograph -- Context Matters (2009).

HT: Tyler Cowen.

Comments

[Rafe Champion]

Just read Nicholas Phillipson's bio of Adam Smith and he showed how Smith was obsessed with the implications of tax laws, the laws of inheritance and property, and tariff rules, in addition to the nature of value and the overwhelming importance of good manners. It is strange that the usual take-home message about Smith is the division of labour and the hidden hand (which is mentioned about once). He could be seen as a great pioneer in institutional (rules of the game) analysis.