The Entrepreneur: A Lost Actor That Should Resurrect (Keynote Speech)

Abstract

A survey of a large number of Norwegian and English language introductory textbooks in economics, microeconomics and business economics, published in the last three decades, had as a result that the entrepreneur was not present at all in most of these books. This is surprising considering the importance of entrepreneurial activity for economic growth in most countries. This paper discusses the importance of specific types of entrepreneurs for the creation of employment, development and growth. Then it gives a historical account of how the entrepreneur was introduced into economics in general and the textbooks of what we today will call economics or business in particular. For almost one hundred and fifty years, the entrepreneur had an important place in economic textbooks used at universities and colleges in the United States and in Norway. However, in Norway the entrepreneur disappeared almost completely from economic textbooks in the 1930. In the United States, the same occurred in the first decade after WWII. In Norway Professor Ragnar Frisch, who in 1969 received the Memorial Nobel Prize in Economics, became a strong believer in a Soviet type planned economy. In such an economy the role of the entrepreneur should be taken over by the economists, who had graduated from his study programme at the University of Oslo. In the United States Professor Paul Samuelson, who received the Memorial Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970 and who for long was an admirer of Ragnar Frisch, eliminated the entrepreneur from economics with the introduction of his Principles of Economic Analysis in 1948. This book has had a tremendous influence on the teaching of economics in many countries across the world. The climate changed in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Economic research showed that the use of markets were the most efficient method to allocate resources to different sectors of production and to distribute final products among diverse groups of consumers. This should also have resulted in the resurrection of the entrepreneur in textbooks of economics and business. However, this did not occur, the entrepreneur is still neglected and the paper explores some avenues that can throw light on this issue. The paper concludes that the time has come for a resurrection of the entrepreneur in textbooks of economics and business in general and particularly in introductory textbooks.