 Welcome to the afternoon portion of our program. It gives me great, great pleasure to introduce the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yusuf Amoued. Robert A. Baer received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 1970. He has taught economics courses at Clemson University, Auburn University, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He also has taught at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and the University of Cain in France. He served as head of the economics department at Auburn University twice. In that capacity, he was instrumental in establishing Auburn's first doctoral program in economics and in the original siting of the Mises Institute at Auburn. He retired from Auburn University as emeritus, Russell Foundation Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies in 2000. And he's an associated scholar of the Mises Institute. He has co-authored numerous works with Robert Eakland, including two books, Secret Origins of Modern Economics, Puy and the Engineers, and the textbook, A History of Economic Theory and Method. The latter book is in its sixth edition, and having been in continuous publication since 1975. Another book, The Marketplace of Christianity, also co-authored with Bob Eakland and Bob Tollison, has been hailed as a pioneering work on the economics of religion. Professor Abert also co-authored with Arthur Link two groundbreaking volumes on entrepreneurship, which really propelled him to the forefront of entrepreneur theorists when they weren't any. These were groundbreaking works. The entrepreneur mainstream views and radical critiques and a second book, A History of Entrepreneurship, each of which has gone through numerous editions. In addition to his 135 books, articles, reviews, and encyclopedia entries, Professor Abert is the past president of the History of Economic Society and the former trustee of the Southern Economics Association. His various books have been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Croatian. He will talk to us today about wither-goest the entrepreneur. Dr. Abert. Thank you for that introduction, Joe. Actually, Joe invited me to speak to this group last year, and at that time he reminded me that 2022 was the 40th anniversary of a book that I wrote with Al Link in 1982 called Simply the Entrepreneur. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but I couldn't come last year, unfortunately. But Joe is a persistent fellow, and so here I am. I'm happy, first of all, I appreciate his confidence in reissuing the invitation. I welcome the opportunity to share with you my reflections on the nature of entrepreneurship and economic theory, my own research on the subject, and on how I regard the future prospects for research. Entrepreneurship research. I've been engaged with this topic on and off for about 40 years. However, I haven't been active in the field in the last dozen or so years. So in order to avoid embarrassing myself, I had to rethink a lot of things that I learned over that span of time. I want to begin the discussion. Well, first of all, the title. It may strike you as a little bit whimsical. That's probably because the topic is a little bit whimsical. But more about that in a moment. I want to start with a brief introduction to what I've written on the subject. In 1982, Al Link and I published this little volume, a monograph, I guess, really, which tried to deal with the history of entrepreneurship as an intellectual concept. It wasn't a practice-oriented sort of survey. It was an intellectual history. Within a year, it was published into Japanese. I don't know if it sold any copies or not. I don't read Japanese. The biggest thing I learned from it is that in Japan, you start at the end of the book and you work your way forward. So that was about 1983, roughly the year after the English edition came out. Then in 1988, our publisher, Prager, agreed to a second edition. So this was a bit enlarged, updated, and so forth. Now we had a dust jacket, which is a sign of progress. And then things kind of just went to sleep for a while. And in 2006, after I had retired from Auburn, my first retirement, and I had also retired from University of Louisiana, Lafayette, my second retirement, Al Link called one day and he said, Well, there's more to that story and I'll get to it in a moment. As far as the timeline goes, in 2006, basically the same argument was presented again and published by now publishers, which I didn't know at the time. I think it's one of these new internet publications. So it came out in a paperback. And then three years later, Rutledge, which is a big publisher that does a lot in economics, I'm sure many of you are familiar with it, it published the same argument basically in its series of articles on the history of economic thought. So this is basically, let me summarize for you. In 2000, excuse me, in 1982, we published an original monograph titled The Entrepreneur. It went through two editions and two subsequent facelifts between 1982 and 2009. In the interim, it was translated into Japanese, packaged and repackaged four times, including the original. Three refereed articles were spun off from it, excuse me. And these appeared in various journals. And so as you can see from the graphic, we continue to promote the same historical message for at least three decades. You may wonder why so much concern about the most shadowy and elusive figure in economic theory. And by the time I'm finished speaking today, I hope you will have some inkling as to an answer to that question. But before we can answer the prime question, why such concern? We have to think about some subsidiary questions. Just who is the entrepreneur and how does she fit into economic theory? In popular culture, the entrepreneur is a figure that energizes economic markets from different perspectives of production, distribution and consumption. Excuse me if I'm a little slow with this, it's unfamiliar technology. So as you know, there are different opportunities for profit, if you will, in different stages of production. First of all, with regard to sourcing materials, getting what you need in order to produce, the entrepreneur has to consider combinations of land, labor and capital. With regard to making the product, the same three resources have to be combined in such a way as to actually physically make a product. To distribute the product, once again, you have different avenues or opportunities along the way to improve things and to make it better. This is starting to look rather familiar. To sell the product, again, there are different entrepreneurial opportunities that arise. Amazon I think is a good example of that. And then finally, to use the product, how to make it better for consumers so as to increase its appeal. So in each of these areas, there are opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. But this popular notion of entrepreneurship didn't spring up overnight. The character and function of the entrepreneur were established by a long and discursive history of discovery, debate and refinement. And this history is what Link and I tried to unravel, beginning roughly in 1980 and leading to the first publication in 1982. I would argue the job is unfinished because despite centuries of reflection by economists, the entrepreneur still lacks a consensus definition. So for my own purposes, I'm going to propose a definition that I think hits the high notes, as it were. I want it to be broad, sweeping, but at the same time brief. So I'm going to borrow from two giant writers in the field, G.L.S. Shackle and Israel Kursner. I would define an entrepreneur as someone who uses alertness, imagination and creativity in taking decisions involving risk and uncertainty. There was a time before most of us were born when the entrepreneur was mentioned, mainly if not exclusively in economics texts. For almost 200 years after the term appeared in Western literature to signify a vital agent of economic activity, only professional economists seemed interested in the subject. Their interest was stimulated initially by a search for the source of profit. The earliest theoretical schema of economics clearly identified investment returns to land in the form of rent, to capital in the form of interest and to labor in the form of wages. But something was missing. A human element, the entrepreneur, proved a useful compliment as the bearer of uncertainty and the lubricant of exchange. However, this insight was not easily assimilated into economic theory for reasons that I shall elaborate momentarily. Throughout its evolutionary history, economics advanced largely within an analytical method known as comparative statics, which left little room for the entrepreneur. Let's take a look at comparative statics and where the entrepreneur fits. In comparative statics, we start off with a basic market situation with a definable equilibrium. Then something disturbs that and we move to a new equilibrium. The entrepreneur, how do we get from A to B? That's what we would expect the entrepreneur to explain. The problem is that this comparative statics model doesn't say anything about what happens between the initial equilibrium and the final equilibrium. It leaves out an important part of the story and that important part of the story is where the entrepreneur comes in. Excuse me, I need to wet my whistle. This method comparative statics that's familiar to every beginning student in economics was brought to its highest level by the great English economist Alfred Marshall. It promoted theoretical progress at considerable expense of reality, a fault that Marshall himself recognized. Its opposite method of analysis is known as dynamics, which attempts to explain what happens between equilibria, the path from A to B. This distinction is, excuse me, the opposite method explains what happens between equilibria. In other words, dynamic analysis is the analysis of sequences in time. This distinction is at least vaguely recognized by all economists. But ease of application favors the stationary over the dynamic. Understanding this leads to, in part, to understanding why, though vital, the entrepreneur became an elusive, often misunderstood character. The next question is, how does the entrepreneur fit into economics? If it doesn't fit in comparative statics, then it must or must it fit somewhere else? So the answer to how the entrepreneur fits in economics depends upon the type of method that you use. He doesn't really have a home in comparative statics. He has a home or she has a home in dynamics, but that has not been the favored way by which economics progressed. Let's look at some of the differences. I'm not going to go through this in detail, but I would call this attempts to show how different things on the left column are treated depending upon the type of analytical method that you use. The thing I would emphasize is the second, with regard to change, the analogy that's most frequently made is that comparative statics is like still life. Imagine an artist's painting is still life. Whereas dynamics is more like a movie. Things happen over time. That's an oversimplification, but nonetheless it helps to solidify, I think, what these differences are. Consider how the elements of time change reading down from the left column and equilibrium and reality are treated differently in each analytical method. Now, whereas conventional economics emphasize comparative statics, an exception has to be made for a group of economists of Germanic extraction, intellectually and geographically centered in Vienna. The senior member of this cadre was Karl Manger. Others were Bombavit and Wieser and a little later, Mises, Schumpeter and Hayek. And of course, there's another generation since. Ludwig von Mises, for whom this center is named, is an exemplar of what has come to be labeled Austrian economics. Mises defined economics broadly as human action, which if so fact, it makes room for the human entrepreneur. But more to the point, Mises and a handful of fellow travelers in the U.S. and abroad typically were more concerned with disequilibrium processes than equilibrium states. This is, as of course many, if not all of you know, it's one of the distinguishing characteristics of Austrian economics, but it set them apart from their more orthodox brethren. As a minority, Austrian economists have struggled to be heard, which is perhaps one of the reasons for the stubborn neglect of the entrepreneur by the Brahmins of economic theory. Now, it wasn't always so. The entrepreneur dotted practically every page of Irish economist Richard Cantillon's 1755 work, an essay on the nature of trade. Cantillon casts the entrepreneur as an arbitrageur who bridges gaps between demand and supply, chanceing that a right guess would pay off, but knowing that a mistake would be costly. Two decades later, Adam Smith brought structure to the theory of economic development. He recognized the role of economic agency, but he imposed moral sensibilities on the entrepreneur. Without using the word, Smith discussed three types of entrepreneurs. First, adventurers, second, projectors, and third, undertakers. I'll say more about that last word. He disparaged the first two and gave his unqualified approval to the last only, which he identified with his prudent man concept that he had developed first in the theory of moral sentiments. In Smith's view, adventurers take undue risks. They are, therefore, just as likely to fail or to lose as to gain. They represent unstable agents in the theory of economic development. Some projectors are honest, but many are not, and the worst do harm to society because they squander resources that could be used to maintain productive labor. Smith reserved his approbation approval for the undertaker, the temperate person who employs capital to support the productive labor that fosters economic development. Now, you don't have to be a French scholar to know that entrepreneur translates basically into undertaker. Not one word but undertaker. Unfortunately, by twist of linguistic fate, undertaker came to be associated almost entirely with funerals. And so it was dropped, and entrepreneur, the French word, became an English word as it were, and snuck into the English language. Smith was a superb system builder, but his tendency to confuse capital, profit, and interest obscured rather than clarified the role of the entrepreneur. Even the efforts of Alfred Marshall, more than a century later, could not fully repair the damage. Marshall greatly advanced the foundations of microeconomics, but he spoke of entrepreneurs sometimes as a class and sometimes as individuals. He said little about invention and innovation, even though he was aware of their importance. John Maynard Keynes, Marshall's student, emphasized animal spirits describing the instincts, the gut instincts, that businessmen that underlie businessmen's confidence in action. But his followers didn't pick up on this, and it became a mere curiosum of Keynesian economics. Let me speak a little bit about the macro-micro dichotomy. Often economists allow a wedge between microeconomics and macroeconomics, but in fact, the entrepreneur usually finds a home in either one. The first century and a half, the conceptual history of entrepreneurship, focused on defining the role of the entrepreneur primarily within the operation of individual markets. During this time, up to and including the work of Frank Knight, Cantillon's matter of fact definition of the entrepreneur prevailed. The entrepreneur was defined as the entity that took risks in the face of uncertainty. Successful entrepreneurs earn profit, unsuccessful ones bore losses. Important changes to the economic world view occurred in the 20th century, which in turn led to different perceptions of the entrepreneur, and to subsequent changes in entrepreneurship research. Two transformative factors followed closely upon one each other, the Great Depression on the one hand, World War II on the other hand. After the war, it became clear that economic development was critical to rebuilding war-ravaged Europe and to restoring the U.S. economy from the depths of the depression. Emphasis therefore shifted from microeconomics to macroeconomics, or to put it another way, development economics was ripe for redevelopment. Canes in economics established a new prescriptive orthodoxy in matters of economic policy, but his concept of animal spirits notwithstanding, it didn't leave much room for the entrepreneur. That task failed to a contemporary of Canes from Vienna. He came to the U.S. in 1934 to escape Hitler, and he found a new home at Harvard University. I'm speaking, of course, of Joseph Schumpeter. He submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Vienna in 1911. It was written in German and it wasn't translated into English until 1939. The same year in which Schumpeter was granted U.S. citizenship. In English, its English title was simply theory of economic development. It posited that economic growth cannot be adequately explained by increases in the factors of production because economic growth involves changes in the use of factors in new and more valuable ways, which Schumpeter called creative destruction. By its nature, he said, economic development is a dynamic process. It is a disturbing of the status quo. Hence, it cannot be adequately expressed and understood within the confines of conventional economic models. Logically, in other words, creative destruction in satyrist parables cannot coexist. By his own rejection of the status quo, Schumpeter established a gateway for the entrepreneur to define and lead the development process. So after Schumpeter, the entrepreneur was almost exclusively the innovator. And here you see some of the various characteristics. Being an innovator is, of course, a complicated thing, but the message for Schumpeter was, this is the guy or gal who disturbs the equilibrium and brings about creative destruction. Schumpeter, I admire Schumpeter a great deal. He was a scholar in the classical sense. He read widely in economic history and allied fields. His economic theory combined ideas from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Leon von Ross with insights from his Austrian forebears, Karl Manger, Friedrich Wieser, and his teacher, Oegen von Bomber. Schumpeter believed, as Marx did, that economic processes are organic and that change comes from internal as well as external factors. He also admired Marx's blend of sociology and economics, a trait Marx shared with Weber. He replaced Val Ross's ethereal robotic entrepreneur with a living, breathing person of body and spirit. And he made that person the key agent of equilibrium-disturbing economic change. This next slide is just to sort of remind you that throughout history, over a very long period of time, there have been things that take place that sort of define eras and offer entrepreneurial opportunities of one kind or another. Continuing with Schumpeter, there is a pause over his theory. He feared that technical progress would allow business decisions to become increasingly routineized, which would expand administration, discourage spontaneous order, destabilize democracy, and increase the allure of socialism. Technical progress means many things that formerly had to be visualized in a flash of genius could now be calculated, in fact calculated rapidly. On the one hand, entrepreneurial success draws the best minds to it, thereby generating more success. But on the other hand, what if innovation itself is reduced to routine? Schumpeter believed that the very success of capitalism might lead to its destruction. It would only require that entrepreneurship devolved into administration. Administration is a dog whistle for central planning, and central planning makes entrepreneurship obsolete. Schumpeter's theory achieved widespread appeal. He accepted the plaudits that came his way as though fame was his birthright. He never lacked self-confidence. Indeed, the reach of his intellect was matched only by the size of his ego. He is said to have announced to a colleague that his three ambitions in life were to become the greatest economist, the greatest lover, and the greatest horseman, and that he had yet to achieve only the last. So here we have Schumpeter coming in to tell us about creative destruction. Schumpeter definitely changed the argument, shook things up. But he didn't have the last word. Not everyone agreed with his conception of the entrepreneur. Some felt that his treatment of uncertainty was incomplete. Others thought it was a mistake to deny risk-taking as an entrepreneurial function, which he did. But his most radical break was methodological. His theory of creative destruction required a focus on the dynamics of market competition rather than the statics of competitive equilibrium. So in a phrase, Schumpeter upset the equilibrium apple cart. There were grumblings, however, even before Schumpeter's death in 1950. As early as 1943, G.L.S. Shackle, George Leland Sherman Shackle, a British economist, underlined the incongruity between recognizing the entrepreneur on the one hand and failing to integrate him or her into economic theory on the other. In the 1960s, William Baumol complained that conventional economic models ignored economic initiative, thus turning business people, he said, into passive automaton maximizers. Rather than fixate on risk or innovation, Baumol urged that economists focus on how the marginal cost of risk-bearing can be reduced and what economic conditions make R&D easiest and most effective. In the following decade, Israel Kursner, Mises' student at NYU, where Baumol also taught, launched his critique of conventional views, including Schumpeters. The Chicago School of Economists graced in its heyday by Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Sam Pelsman, Gary Becker, etc., etc., though they differed on methodological grounds, nevertheless embraced certain Austrian themes, including entrepreneurship. In 1975, Chicago Luminary and Nobel laureate Ted Schultz proposed his every-man concept of entrepreneurship, defining it as the ability to deal with disequilibria. Wide-sweeping. Using different words, Richard Cantillon had said the same thing in 220 years earlier. These various post-war attempts to rehabilitate the entrepreneur occurred mostly within a historical vacuum. Link and I began our collaborative research on the history of entrepreneurship during this foment to provide an appropriate foundation for debate. I won't say that we were led by an invisible hand, but we discovered a topic that married our interests, mind in the history of economic thought and his in the economics of innovation and technical change. We started our research around 1980 and published our first book on the subject in 1982. Both Schackel and Kirsner encouraged our efforts. I met Schackel at a conference in Cambridge around 1980 where he confided to me his admiration in Cantillon. When I asked him to write the forward to the entrepreneur, he graciously agreed. Provided, he said, we don't change one word or comma or jot or tittle of what I have written, which I was happy to do. He is a meticulous writer and I find that his words still resonate. From the forward, this is Schackel speaking. Can a list which begins with the dramatist, the symphonist and the mathematician come naturally and fittingly at last to the businessman, the entrepreneur. All of these are originators. The world with such a man around, excuse me, the world which such a man senses around him may be in itself the same sort of world as presents itself to all of us. But what it means to him is different. No perception is no doubt an act of interpretation, a finding in or injecting into sense impressions, a meaning that collating with them of numerous, numberless memories of experience, the seeing in them of possibilities. This same activity of thought, but at an enormously enriched, intensified and outranging degree, is what marks the creative writer, composer or theoretician and it is what marks the entrepreneur. Clearly for Schackel there is something integral, essential and universal about entrepreneurship and that something is imagination. But he insisted that entrepreneurship requires an extra gift, nerve. The entrepreneur must commit to action. Schackel's definition of entrepreneurship is uncomplicated and straightforward. Entrepreneurship, he says, is decision making not among actual, but among, I lost my place, not among actual, but among imagined circumstances. I think his view emphasizes the three classic themes of entrepreneurship prior to Schumpeter, namely uncertainty, risk, action. Throughout the 1970s, Israel Kursner was actively trying to reconcile Kantian and Schumpeter, the arbitrageur versus the innovator. Kursner's entrepreneur does not necessarily upset an existing equilibrium, but rather helps restore equilibrium by being alert to opportunities that had not been previously recognized. Dutch economist Arnold Hirchi claims that Schumpeter provides the missing link in Schump, excuse me, Kursner provides the missing link in Schumpeter's no man's land between invention and innovation by establishing the tripartite entrepreneurial components of A, alertness to information, B, awareness of new opportunities and C, response to market opportunities. So let me take you back to the future for a moment. Go back to this slide. The first edition of the entrepreneur was reviewed in the history of political economy by Reuven Brenner. He's a Canadian economist born in Romania and educated in Israel. He found our book extremely superficial, confused and brief. Adding gratuitously, there is simply nothing in this book which would induce one to read it. Paul Samuelson once said, In the long run, the economics scholar works for the only coin worth having, our own applause. Well, Brenner clearly wasn't applauding. So maybe Link and I were wasting our time. But Israel Kursner's review was kinder. He wrote in the Southern Economic Journal that the book was most welcome, adding its formidable strength renders it a work of pioneering excellence. Well, my friend, sometimes stubbornness succeeds when timidity fails. Prager publishers agreed to a second edition, so they must have at least covered their cost on the first. The second edition of the entrepreneur appeared in 1988. This time, Francis Esposito of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth said in the review of Industrial Organization, it is an excellent book and perfectly timed. However, sales were lackluster. As far as I was concerned, by this time the book had just been reduced to one more line on my resume. Link left for Auburn from Madison and Ray's University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he still continues to do research in the fields of entrepreneurship, technological advance, and so forth. I moved on, well, no, not quite yet. This takes us to the 90s. And during the 90s, the books went out of print. And the copyright reverted back to the authors. So when I left Auburn at the beginning of the millennium, because I had maxed out my pension benefits, I went to my native, back to my native state, might as well be honest, went back to my native state in Louisiana, and I accepted a visiting position at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. But by 2005, I had tired of the classroom and retired, as I said, for the second time. Well, I no longer got all the chalk dust out from under my fingernails, which used to accompany people of my generation who taught. Then the phone rang. It was Al Link, and he said, I found a publisher. I think it's time to republish our book. Well, I said, if you think so. So he did. And this is what, in 2006, this is what came out in the sort of aqua color there. Historic perspectives and economics. Well, that didn't satisfy Link. He kept working, and he convinced Rutledge to publish this, which they did in, as I said, their economics, their studies in the history of economics series. So what started in 1982 wound up in 2009 embellished somewhat and elaborated on so forth and so on. But it's the same message. This time, talking about 2009, I didn't even bother to check the reviews. It said the third time is the charm. Here is the fourth time, and I wasn't expecting a lot of charm. So much to my surprise. Well, here's what I expected. I expected all the old tropes would be trotted out, you know, like old wine and new bottles. Or how long can you beat a dead horse? Link was alert to something that I missed, namely that the interest in entrepreneurship had broadened and deepened over time. I was unprepared for the reception that followed. In 2011, which is still a relatively short time after the appearance of the book in 2009, reviewing that book in... Well, I forgot the name of the journal. But the person who was reviewing it was author of the Oxford History of Indian Business. He was a renowned Indian scholar, and he called it an unqualified success. And further enthused, quote, seldom has been so much knowledge compressed between two hard covers and that too on a subject of vast significance. I recalled the Samuelson quotation once again. This time I was hordely encouraged by the coin worth having. But honestly, the differences between the first essay in 1982 and the last in 2009 were not sufficient to warrant such praise. So why a recognition lag of three decades? I don't have an answer. And even if I did, it wouldn't change matters. When Link and I began our historical investigations, Mark Cassin, who was an author who was written in this field, wrote in the new palgrave a dictionary of economics. There are several theories of the entrepreneur, but very few mathematical models which formally analyze entrepreneurial behavior within a closed economic system. The same year in which our final statement came out, 2009, Roger Capo lamented, the field of entrepreneurship is rich in facts, but poor in theory. Time has done little to dim either of these comments. So where do we go from here? I don't like to make predictions because they're too easily proven wrong. There are signs, however, that interest in entrepreneurship has never been stronger. Here are a few facts. Between 1980 and 2015, the number of journals devoted to entrepreneurship increased 500% from 10 to 64. And that was in 2015. There are probably a few more now. Academia, which is a recognized online bibliographic database I'm sure some of you are familiar with, reports almost 760,000 followers of the general topic of entrepreneurship. With regard to what I could trace about publications that Link and I are responsible for, Google Scholar has tracked over 4,000 citations to A-Bear and Link publications on entrepreneurship. And ResearchGate, which is another one of these bibliographic online websites, has recently registered over 19,000 reads of a history of entrepreneurship, which is the final statement. Now I'm not going to try to evaluate every animate version on the subject of entrepreneurship, but I do harbor a few beliefs. Some of the published research from Allied Fields strikes me as mere window dressing. For example, Steve Gideon, director of the Ryerson Entrepreneurial Institute in Toronto, writing an entrepreneurial practice review asks the off-repeated question, what is entrepreneurship? It's a legitimate question. It's been asked many times and answered many ways. Gideon believes a lexicographic approach is the way or can be helpful in helping us understand entrepreneurship. In other words, he claims that there are, excuse me, as many as 40 or more different subdomains of entrepreneurship, and he proposes identifying them and somehow arranging them in a lexicographic work. I couldn't reproduce the whole page here, it's a way you could read it, but this is an example of some of his subdomains. Each of these subdomains consists of an adjective and a noun that you can see. The noun never changes, only the adjective changes. And this he thinks is progress. Some of his most esoteric subdomains include, you may not be able to read them all, gender-based entrepreneurship, race-based entrepreneurship, lifestyle entrepreneurship, and my favorite esoterica, diaspora entrepreneurship. Gideon claims that this lexicon can be used to eliminate contradictions and promote clarity as to the meaning of entrepreneurship. But how does changing the adjectives ad infinitum tell us anything essential or basic about the nature and function of the entrepreneur? It seems unlikely that Gideon has heard of Occam's razor. His indiscriminate approach is so pliable it could easily become what G.D.H. Cole once said of socialism, quote, it has become like a hat that has lost its shape because everybody has used it and used it in its own fashion. If economists and those from allied fields cannot reach a consensus definition of entrepreneurship after more than two and a half centuries of academic debates, it is unlikely that a consensus will be reached anytime soon. In this regard, what passes as recent research is not encouraging. But I do see a promising avenue of future research for the role of entrepreneurship in policy matters. A small group of scholars at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm are doing interesting studies along these lines. These researchers believe that differentiating between types of entrepreneurial activity provides clues to the puzzle of why top-down policies often fail to create Schumpeterian entrepreneurship and the ecosystems in which it thrives. Whereas Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is essentially disruptive and contrarian, but Schumpeterian policy is inherently biased towards incremental innovation and replication of past successes. Clearly, if central planners knew what the next radical innovation would be, there would be no need for Schumpeterian entrepreneurs. And by extension, if Schumpeterian entrepreneurs or any entrepreneurs for that matter were net welfare enhancing, there would be no need for central planning. However entrepreneurial activity is defined, it is decentralized and unplanned, and thus can be negated or undone by central planning. So it's about time for me to conclude, and I wish to conclude by returning to the original question, with or go as to the entrepreneur. It's a vexing question because it's impossible to answer. Nevertheless, whatever future direction, excuse me, whatever direction future research takes, it now has a sturdy historical foundation. Link and I have drawn out the analytical separation between static and dynamic theories, insofar as they relate to economics in general and the placement of entrepreneurship within them. We have forced entrepreneurship researchers to confront the nature of decisions that must be taken under conditions of uncertainty. We have raised issues concerning the establishment of a separate field of inquiry for entrepreneurship and what form that should take. And we have insinuated that better appreciation of the practicalities of entrepreneurship requires acceptance, understanding and intolerance of views from different minds as well as from practical experiences. Ultimately, the impact of our contribution is not ours to judge. I'm going to close by borrowing an analogy from one of my earliest mentors in economics. Herman Daly, who later became a leader in the field of environmental economics, nudged me into the field of economics when I was an undergraduate many years ago. Herman died recently, but before his death, he told an interviewer at the New York Times regarding his own intellectual achievements. Quote, My duty is to do the best I can and put out some ideas. Whether the seed that I plant is going to grow is not up to me. It's just up to me to plant it and water it. Well, Al Link and I planted a seed four decades ago. It was a small seed and it lay fallow for a long time, but we watered it repeatedly. After many years, there are encouraging signs that the seed has taken root and sprouted. It's not necessary that everyone cultivated, but if capitalism is not to devolve into central planting, its defense may have to depend on a handful of scholars who are motivated by nothing more than intellectual curiosity. We cheer them on. The study of entrepreneurship can be both enlightening and rewarding. Or as an anonymous observer reputedly said, people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. Thank you for your patience.