No Free Lunch: Economics for a Fallen World: Third Edition, Revised

Chapter Nine: P31W: Enter the Entrepreneur! 219 All entrepreneurs must have control and responsibility for the actions they take. Who can be an entrepreneur with a great idea if he or she doesn’t have the authority to implement the plan? Can a janitor make a company-wide decision? Of course not. That doesn’t mean that janitors can’t be entrepreneurial, just that the scope of their entrepreneurial opportunities is significantly reduced (as compared to Tesla’s Elon Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). Joseph was initially not in a position to implement his prescient vision from God, but Pharaoh quickly realized Joseph was blessed by God and gave him the authorities necessary to exercise control and assume responsibility. These attributes certainly aren’t exhaustive; one can imagine a number of attributes that support entrepreneurship. However, these are certainly key attributes: creativity, diligence, perseverance, courage, prescience, and control. Other authors might want to include luck—but we know there is no luck with a sovereign, providential God. And even from a secular perspective, luck is when preparation meets opportunity. For the Christian, there is no such thing as luck and it is certainly not needed for entrepreneurship. It would be tempting to say that entrepreneurship is a function of intellect, and clearly many of the entrepreneurs we see are bright people. But high intelligence is not necessarily a requirement. Rather, any person can use the attributes we described above to be an entrepreneur. So there are no excuses! IT’S A WRAP! The Proverbs 31 Woman provided an excellent case study of the functions of entrepreneurship as well as some of the entrepreneurial attributes. But her entrepreneurship was embedded in a cultural and institutional context—she had the freedom to produce and trade. She had the legal ability to purchase assets and meet market needs, once she anticipated future market conditions. In this chapter, we began our examination of the market process by introducing the entrepreneur. Markets can’t live without entrepreneurs; they navigate the turbulent waters of time and uncertainty. But markets can’t live with only entrepreneurs—they need an institutional framework to steer entrepreneurs through the market process. The most creative and alert people are nevertheless shackled if they don’t have institutions that allow them to use their gifts. How do institutions enable entrepreneurship? That is the subject of our next chapter.