Economics Doctoral Programs Still Elide Entrepreneurship · Econ Journal Watch : Entrepreneur, innovation, institution, invention, teaching, textbook

Many academics and policymakers regard entrepreneurship as a vital topic, often considering it a driving force behind job creation and economic growth. But thinking about entrepreneurship mostly takes place outside of mainstream economics. In his article “The Place of Entrepreneurship in ‘The Economics That Might Have Been,’” Sidney Winter (2016) aptly defines mainstream economics as the “unflinching application of the combined postulates of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, and market equilibrium.” Theories of economic change that define the entrepreneur, such as those proposed by Joseph Schumpeter, Frank Knight, Israel Kirzner, or Deirdre McCloskey and Arjo Klamer have not found a receptive audience in that dominant strand of economics. The entrepreneur represents interpretive asymmetry, variation, and novelty. A richer body of economic theory could explore the factors that make for interpretive creativity and its consequences, such as market innovation and economic growth. But the entrepreneurial element is difficult to formalize mathematically and was thus pushed out of view as such formalization became increasingly dominant from the 1930s onwards (Baumol 1968; 2006; Blaug 1986; Barreto 1989; Hébert and Link 1989; 2007; Discuss this article at Journaltalk: http://journaltalk.net/articles/5943