The Past Speaks

Izabella Kaminska of the FT’s Alphaville Team has written a great piece that applies Baumol’s typology of entrepreneurs to the present and the past. However, I’m not at all convinced that Unproductive Entrepreneurship is new. The article kinda suggests that there was a long period between the end of the Roman Empire and the present in which Unproductive Entrepreneurship went away and the “good” type of entrepreneurship was predominant. I’m convinced that this was really the case, even during the thirty years of high growth after 1945, although I would concede that there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that Unproductive Entrepreneurship is becoming more frequent today.