Читать книгу The New Builders - Seth Levine - Страница 17

Entrepreneur comes from a French root, entreprendre, which means “to undertake,” according to Merriam Webster Dictionary. The modern concept of an entrepreneur is thought to have originated with French economist Jean‐Baptiste Say in 1800. In Say's telling, an entrepreneur is an “adventurer,” someone who “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”

Even before Say, Richard Cantillon, an Irishman living in France at the time he published Essai sur la Nature du Commerce au General (Essay on the Nature of Commerce), referred to “entrepreneurs” as those who produce something at a fixed cost with the intention to sell it at an unknown price. He also referred to entrepreneurs as “adventurers,” which maps closely to the language that Say used and is perhaps where Say took his idea. Cantillon's book was likely the first to outline a complete economic theory – coming some 50 years before Adam Smith's more famous Wealth of Nations (Cantillon's book was published posthumously around 1750, but sections of the work were reportedly widely read in the 20 years leading up to its publication).¹¹ Unlike Smith, who didn't mention the role of entrepreneurs in his seminal work, Cantillon placed entrepreneurship and the role of disruptors at the center of his economic theory. Cantillon was, in many ways, the pregenerator of modern economic theory as it relates to entrepreneurship. In his thinking, entrepreneurship stood at the center of economic activity and was the core from which broader economies developed.¹²

The first serious modern‐day academic to think about entrepreneurship was Czech economist Joseph Schumpeter, who identified people – “wild spirits,” he called them – who engaged in what he termed “creative destruction” in the business sector. It was these individuals who were responsible for virtually all of the innovation and much of the growth in the economies he studied. Schumpeter moved to the United States in 1932 and taught at Harvard University. His ideas of these wild spirits captured much of what America loved about small businesses of the middle of the century. He believed change came from individuals, from within. And the wildness he described suggested this entrepreneurial spirit could come from anywhere. Indeed, in his view, anyone could start a business and succeed. This idea fit nicely with the American ethos of the day and played directly into the long and deep‐seated narrative of America as a land of opportunity, a place of adventure and risk. It was a land where people were not bound by the circumstances from which they came, but rather, by what they made of their natural abilities. It suggested a certain boundlessness to opportunities and an ability to make or remake oneself. It played to Americans' love of risk and to our celebration of individualism.

For much of America's history, the vast majority of Americans were entrepreneurs. Wild spirits colonized the West, built America's cities and towns, and created the infrastructure that supported commerce and domestic society. The early days of America found most people pursuing entrepreneurial ventures. Being industrious didn't set one apart in that time – it was table stakes for survival. And owning a small business, such as a tannery, bakery, or farm, was seen as a pathway to a better life. Consider the many early American novels that revolve around small business owners and entrepreneurs (not always successful ones!) such as Willa Cather's O Pioneers! or Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons.

As in every other sphere of American life, race and gender have always been part of the story – and often a hidden part. It wasn't only Elizabeth Keckley who disappeared from the narrative. William Leidesdorff (1810–1848) was a Black hotel builder who owned an import/export business and a chandlery shop, as well as lumber and shipyards. By the time of his death, Leidesdorff was worth an estimated $1.5 million, and he is believed to have been the first Black American millionaire. Stephen Smith (1796–1873), an enslaved person, eventually became a successful Pennsylvanian lumber merchant and prominent abolitionist. These early, important stories of the success of people of color are often lost in our narrative, as are the stories of the many who have come after them and found success based on their entrepreneurial efforts.

Women‐run ventures disappeared from the story in another way: they became part of the backdrop. Many early women‐led enterprises, operations like laundry services, boarding homes, and dressmaking shops, were seen simply as an extension of normal household work, not as legitimate enterprises of their own. This has always been a mistake: these women‐owned businesses could be sizable, and many required skilled labor, including dressmaking and millinery, that were learned through workplace apprenticeships.

By the late 1800s, patents obtained by women grew at three times the rate of patents issued to men. At least a tenth of urban businesspeople in the mid‐nineteenth century were women, and by the early 1900s, there were tens of thousands of women‐owned businesses in the United States. The sectors of our economy dominated by women were, and continue to be, undercounted and undervalued meaningful parts of the overall US business landscape.^iv

Small businesses were their own economic engines, turning people from workers into owners, offering prosperity and a chance to be an agent of social and economic change. Collectively, the economic power of these small businesses was enormous, and in some cases, a threat to larger corporations that tried to use their pricing and sometimes near‐monopoly power to dominate industries. These monopolistic impulses were countered by government and legal action that, while varied in their effectiveness and intensity, over time largely kept some semblance of balance between large corporations and small businesses.

This has been the imperfect, sometimes challenging, sometimes wonderful story of small business and entrepreneurship in America, right up until the middle of the twentieth century.