The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur
Title Page
Essays on Organizations and Markets
Peter G. Klein
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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ISBN: 978-1-933550-79-4
Dedication
The entrepreneur hires the technicians, i.e., people who have the ability and the skill to perform definite kinds and quantities of work. The class of technicians includes the great inventors, the champions in the field of applied science, the constructors and designers as well as the performers of the most simple tasks. The entrepreneur joins their ranks as far as he himself takes part in the technical execution of his entrepreneurial plans.
Foreword by Doug French
Introduction
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be an Austrian economist. Well, not quite, but I was exposed to Austrian economics early on. I grew up in a fairly normal middle-class household, with parents who were New Deal Democrats. In high school, a friend urged me to read Ayn Rand, and I was captivated by her novels. I went on to read some of her nonfiction works, in which she recommended books by Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. I don’t remember which economics books I read first, maybe Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson or Mises’s Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.
1. Economic Calculation and the Limits of Organization
Economists have become increasingly frustrated with the textbook model of the firm. The “firm” of intermediate microeconomics is a production function, a mysterious “black box” whose insides are off-limits to respectable economic theory (relegated instead to the lesser disciplines of management, organization theory, industrial psychology, and the like).
2. Entrepreneurship and Corporate Governance
In his “closing salvo” in the socialist calculation debate, Mises (1949, pp. 694–711) argued that the market socialists failed to understand the role of financial markets in an industrial economy. Even with markets for consumer goods, he explained, socialism would fail because it substituted collective ownership of the means of production for private capital markets. Through these markets, owners of financial capital decide which firms, and which industries, receive resources to make consumer goods.
3. Do Entrepreneurs Make Predictable Mistakes?
With Sandra K. Klein
4. The Entrepreneurial Organization of Heterogeneous Capital
With Kirsten Foss, Nicolai J. Foss, and Sandra K Klein
