The Fairest Society Is The One Which Most Energetically Promotes The Entrepreneurial Creativity Of All Its Members.

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This post is based on – and utilizes a lot of the language from – The Theory Of Dynamic Efficiency by Jesus Huerta De Soto, an essay that highlights with great clarity some of the essential differences between Austrian economics and mainstream economics.

It seems as though those of us who favor free markets and the unleashing of the creative power of entrepreneurship have lost control of the language.

Take the word fairness as an example. In today’s perceptions of social justice (which, in itself, is an other term we’ve lost to irrational interpretation), fairness is deemed to require equalized outcomes for all. No-one should have more wealth or income than anyone else. Any institution or process or arrangement that tends towards an outcome that can be deemed unequal is unfair. 

Is this way of thinking good for society? There is an entirely different way of thinking, one which will lead to a much more dynamic and productive society that advances with great agility and energy towards a better future for all.

Economist Jesus Huerta de Soto calls this way of thinking “dynamic efficiency”. Efficient is another word that is typically misused in economics. It has been made to mean something like using fewer resources in order to achieve a given output. The point about dynamic efficiency is that output is never given. Thanks to individual human creativity, especially in the form of entrepreneurship, output is always changing, improving, becoming more effective and more useful and more valued by customers. The question should not be how to use fewer resources, but how to use resources in a good way to produce better outcomes.

Neither resources nor technology are “given” in real life. They can vary and actually do vary continually – as a result of entrepreneurial activity. This is the essence of dynamic efficiency – continuous change for the better. When so-called welfare economics calls for redistribution of resources in order to address perceived inequality, it is based on a static view. Interpersonal comparisons of what economists call utility require a snapshot to freeze data in time in order to analyze and decompose It. Meanwhile, time and economic conditions and entrepreneurship and innovation continue apace, and whatever comparisons are made are rendered irrelevant.

Such comparisons completely ignore dynamic efficiency, the capacity to foster entrepreneurial creativity and co-ordination and collaboration, and to seek, discover and overcome any maladjustments or unmet needs in society and among its members. The most important goal is to apply these dynamics and continually shift possibilities to a new higher level.

The driver of this creative and dynamic energy of improvement is entrepreneurship. This can be understood as the typical human ability to recognize opportunities for profit that appear in the environment and to act accordingly to take advantage of them. Entrepreneurs are alert to these opportunities. They are creative in producing new knowledge, new solutions, and new possibilities. The entrepreneurial process never stops or ends. There are always new opportunities to be seized, whether in the form of new ends (things we achieve that we never thought we’d be able to) or new means (better ways to reach goals for which we may have been striving for a long time).

Will there be waste as all these new opportunities are pursued? Probably. Can perfect equality or static efficiency be reached. No – because the dynamic creation and discovery of new outcomes is never balanced, it’s always tilted towards change and towards a better future.

What, then, can we say of the ethics or the social justice of this dynamic and creative economy? We address that question from the perspective that every person possesses an innate creative capacity that enables them to perceive and discover the profit opportunities that arise in their environment, and to act accordingly to take advantage of them. Entrepreneurship is the typically human ability to perpetually create and discover new ends and means. The ethical principle is that each person has the right to the results of their entrepreneurial creativity. Whatever they create, they keep. It’s not a matter of redistribution, but it is a matter of equity. Earn it, keep it.

That’s why de Soto says, “the fairest society is the one which most energetically promotes the entrepreneurial creativity of all its members” – a society in which no authority will expropriate the results, partially or totally, of the creative entrepreneurial process. Social ethics hinge on the private ownership of that which is entrepreneurially created and discovered, based on the voluntary exchange of all goods and services. 

Regulation and state intervention in pursuit of redistribution or restriction of entrepreneurial activity impedes creative action, limits people’s creative capacity , and the new knowledge and innovation that moves society forward. State intervention is both dynamically inefficient and ethically reprehensible.

A dynamic and ethical society under these principles will evolve the institutions that can support them. Entrepreneurial behavior takes place best in emergent common law legal frameworks, and moral frameworks. Taxation policies can undermine entrepreneurship, as can misconceived regulation and economic intervention. The law should be on the side of entrepreneurial creativity.

Social justice concepts such as fairness and efficiency should be re-examined through the lens of economic dynamism and creativity driven by entrepreneurship. All in society thrive most in the entrepreneurial environment.

134. Per Bylund: The Unrealized

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Understanding The Unrealized requires us as entrepreneurial businesspeople to think better, and to resist settling for what is merely feasible in a regulated, risk-mitigated world. We must ask what could be possible in a different world, and act on that basis. Sound economics supports such action. Per Bylund takes us through his thinking about The Unrealized.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

First, see beyond what’s there.

From Bastiat’s famous parable about the broken window comes the economist’s instinct to think about 2nd, 3rd, and Nth order consequences of actions. These are typically unseen by those who don’t think like economists, and never even considered by politicians.

Entrepreneurs always have 2nd or 3rd alternative actions in mind if the consequences of their first choice are unexpected, and they will always adjust further if required by customer feedback, with the constant aim of producing high customer value and satisfaction. They see beyond what’s there.

Government regulators and legislators make promises on the basis of forecast 1st order consequences only.

Regulators promise that the consequences of their actions will be beneficial, at least to some groups. For example, in minimum wage legislation, they promise a pay raise for the lowest paid workers. What is not seen are all the jobs that disappear — are never offered — as a 2nd order consequence of making minimum wage labor unaffordable to the profit seeking entrepreneurs, the ones who create jobs.

Beyond the unseen is The Unrealized.

In reality, regulations are not what politicians promise. They are not actions to help people. They are restrictions on entrepreneurs’ economic behavior. Entrepreneurs are aiming at satisfying customer wants as much as possible. Regulations aim to restrict this customer-satisfying action by forbidding certain innovations, or declaring that they must be designed and implemented in ways that have value for the regulator and not for the customer or entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are forced to abandon some of their efforts to generate new value by satisfying customers, or to redirect their efforts into less value-producing channels. The potential output of their creativity goes Unrealized.

Society accumulates and compounds losses when entrepreneurial creativity is curtailed.

What could have been the case if entrepreneurs were unbound, if the regulatory chains were cast off? We can’t know. But we can know that The Unrealized is a cost to society.

And the cost is cumulative. Technology and innovation thrive and grow in response to observations of how customers experience value from it. Entrepreneurs introduce a new application of technology by building on what’s available today and adding to the value experience that they observe customers enjoying today. If innovation is restricted by regulation (or any other barrier), these observations can’t take place. The next big thing that builds on today’s big thing won’t happen. We keep falling behind what is possible because of these regulatory restraints. Consumers become cumulatively worse off. Society is permanently and increasingly damaged.

We are placed on a different value trajectory — one that limits our options.

What if Henry Ford had been restricted from introducing assembly line manufacturing of automobiles? It’s not hard to imagine such a case in the OSHA environment of today. What if the innovation cloud of new roads, better engines, gas stations with coffee and hot dogs, and all the other ancillary results of assembly line manufacturing had not been allowed to form?

Such a thought experiment demonstrates how regulation places society on a different trajectory than what is possible from unlimited entrepreneurial innovation. Will Uber’s technology launch us on a trajectory of ever-more-ingenious applications of on-demand service, stimulated by consumers’ unlimited imagination of greater and greater convenience? Or will taxi medallion regulation permanently limit that imagination to keep it within the boundaries of bureaucratic compliance and control?

Per Bylund’s term for the effects of bureaucratic control is limited optionality. Quality of life is elevated when we have greater optionality. Regulators don’t want us to have that experience. Less optionality means less value.

Continuous reinvention can’t be planned.

The second and third and Nth order consequences of unrestricted entrepreneurial creativity and consumer imagination are not subject to planning. Emergent new inventions and innovations are not predictable. The probability of positive outcomes from the creative process can be enhanced by entrepreneurial intent and aspiration and effort. But on the other hand, the range of positive probabilities is greatly reduced by restrictions on that intent and aspiration. What could be is bounded by what is attempted, and regulations narrow the field in which attempts are made.

Make sure you do not restrict your own creativity with self-imposed regulation-like limitations.

Regulation limits innovative possibilities. What if the same is true of your own entrepreneurial practice? What if The Unrealized is concealing itself in your own business? Are you sure that your imagination about possible futures based on your understanding of customer wants is expansive enough? Are you sure that you have considered all possible approaches to satisfying those wants, even the ones that are most unlikely? Have you examined every possible pathway to a unique position in the marketplace? Have you found every possible way to cut out cost and time from your production process? Are all your processes designed and engineered to remove all barriers to successful outcomes?

If you are inside a corporation, are there corporate restrictions that act like regulations, channeling your creativity into pre-ordained pathways and towards pre-selected attractors? Are there unnecessary constraints on emergence?

The Unrealized lurks everywhere. The entrepreneurial task is to root it out.

Additional Resources

Per Bylund’s book, The Seen, The Unseen, And The Unrealized: Mises.org/E4B_134_Book

Mises U 2021 presentation, “The Seen, The Unseen And The Unrealized”: Mises.org/E4B_134_Lecture

“The Broken Window Fallacy” by Robert P. Murphy: Mises.org/E4B_134_Article1

“Compounding Shortfalls in Innovation” by Hunter Hastings: Mises.org/E4B_134_Article2

“Mark Spitznagel: At What Price Safety?” — another take on The Unrealized from an investing perspective: Mises.org/E4B_134_Article3

Economics In The Digital Age Is Different.

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Steve Denning is one of our most important and insightful writers at the intersection of economics, business, and management. He has been in the lead in alerting the business world to the imperative of new thinking about organization, embracing agility and the end of hierarchy, agile processes, and digital transformation. His message: management must change to keep up with technology.

Recently, he turned his attention to economics. His conclusion: economics must change to keep up with technology. Mainstream economics that is; we Austrians may claim a special position, as I’ll argue below.

A school or tradition of economics (such as “mainstream economics”) tends to be defined by stacking dead economists and their theories one on top of another and calling the resulting intellectual edifice a definitive body of work for the filling of textbooks. Later arrivals to the school limit themselves to publishing marginal elucidations. Keynesian economics continues as a set of theories derived from the conditions between the first and second world wars in socialist Britain. Keynesian economists in 2021 continue to insist that these theories still hold, and, in fact, they are the backbone of US Government economic policy today, and the reason it is so disastrous.

In his article Why Mainstream Economists Miss Digital Innovation, Denning drives home just exactly why this backward-looking process of economic theorizing takes us so far off base. Mainstream economists (he quotes Nobel prizewinner Robert Solow) had a very difficult time even recognizing the contribution of digital services to economic value. The “real economy”, Solow opined, was about physical products. Now the largest firms in the world are those delivering primarily digital services. So much for the validity of Nobel rise recognition.

Denning also calls out Robert J Gordon, who asserts that the great innovations occurred before 1970  – innovations such as electricity, household appliances that reduce work, air conditioning that increases comfort and productivity, flushing toilets that improve sanitation and health. Gordon dismisses innovation after 1970 as narrowly focused on entertainment, communication, and information technology. He referred to the arrival of the iPhone as a minor event in entertainment and communications. He failed to realize how a handheld computer in the hands of billions of people radically increases productivity and economic growth, which has been associated with the eradication of poverty, as well as changing how people are educated, given access to healthcare, and put on a pathway to higher aspirations and better lives.

Denning uses this example as an illustration for his conclusion that mainstream economics misses “that digital innovation has changed almost every aspect of human life”. Of what relevance is a field of study that is so oblivious to real life?

Fortunately, there’s a school of economics that understands the dominant role of digital innovation: Austrian economics. There are several points of difference with mainstream economics. One is the understanding that Austrians have of the market as a process and the economy as a constantly changing capital structure. Mainstream economists’ main tool is the study of equilibrium: under what conditions would the economy be perfectly balanced with no more change? Austrians understand that there is no equilibrium, and equilibrium is not a state we desire. The market is a flow of continuous, often dramatic and always accelerating change. Technologies build on technologies and change becomes exponential in terms of impact on growth and improvement. More and more customer value is generated, without limit.

Austrian capital theory recognizes capital in the economy as a flowing river of technology enabling more and more customer value, and constantly changing and improving in response to customers’ never-ending demand for betterment – faster, cheaper, more efficient, more convenient, more comfortable, more productive. Customers demand this continuous change, and technology helps to deliver it.

Another tool in the Austrian economists’ toolbox is the understanding of the role of the entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, and the entrepreneurial method. The entrepreneur has no role in mainstream economics. No one has figured out a mathematical equation to represent this most human of innovative influence. Entrepreneurs are those who look at the world and ask themselves how they can make it better than it is. That’s why Steve Denning can quote an entrepreneur like Marc Andreessen who wrote  “Why Software Is Eating The World” but can’t find any economists to quote.

He could have referred to W. Brian Arthur’s paper, Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In By Historical Events, where he anticipated exponential growth and the rise of the tech titans. Brian Arthur calls his brand of economics “complexity economics”, which is a strand of Austrian economics. Denning might also have quoted Todd H. Chiles on Organizational Emergence, his theory about how firms and markets advance rapidly through stages of dramatic change and increasing value generation as a result of both technology and changing consumer preferences.

Steve Denning is right to say that it’s imperative that mainstream economics catches up with technology. He should go further and call for the widespread recognition of Austrian economics as the economics of radical economic change. It’s already the go-to theory to explain bitcoin, free software, and the economics of video games. Mainstream will never catch up.

133. Ulrich Möller: The Video Game Industry Points to the Future of Organization Design

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Austrian economics has a lot to say about how to organize firms for maximum value generation. Austrian principles point to the delegation of entrepreneurial judgement to the front-line employees who interact directly with those who actually create value: users.

The military organization models of the twentieth century, involving command-and-control in hierarchical structures, are slow to change, and the management literature evidences an unwillingness to abandon the hierarchy. But there is a fast-growing industry that’s the locus of prodigious value generation where the hierarchy has already been abandoned and flat networks of distributed judgement are taking its place. Ulrich Möller is one of several Austrian economists who are studying the firms in the video game industry and demonstrating how their findings can bring positive organizational change to the rest of the business world.

Download The Episode Resource “The Future of Organization Design” (PDF) – Download

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Organizational innovation has a long and successful track record in the video game industry.

A lot of value has been generated in the video game industry in a short period of time. Video games surpass movies and music in revenue. Without a long history of corporate hierarchies and bureaucracy to shed, firms in the industry embraced the organizational innovations of open source software, including anonymous collaboration among highly distributed self-organized teams, peer review systems, and agile processes.

In addition, the industry created its own laboratory for testing revolutionary organizational theories in virtual economies set in virtual worlds.

Valve is a company in the video game industry that took organizational innovation to its logical conclusion: the end of hierarchy.

Valve — a very successful, industry-leading company — pursued a value-generation logic to frame its approach to organization:

  • Creativity is our core resource — the most important skill in game development.
  • Creative employees are key to our capabilities.
  • Creative people are most productive when left to express their own creativity in their own way.
  • Hierarchy blocks creativity, as do planning and routine.
  • How do we design a company to attract and retain the sort of people who are able to take the boldest creative steps?

The answer? Let employees decide what to work on. Let them exercise entrepreneurial judgement. Let them, in effect, do both strategy and implementation. Give them all the decision rights. Let them identify customer preferences — since they know the customer best; let them decide how best to address those preferences; let them decide how to achieve competitive differentiation; let them allocate resources, choose costs, and manage profitability; let them control quality and decide when software is ready to ship.

Employees work in self-organizing teams, and are free to migrate from team to team, and free to change their roles. There are no fixed job descriptions.

In place of command-and-control, a few simple rules or constraints have emerged for the exercise of governance.

F.A. Hayek wrote about norms that emerge in social groups to shape behavior. These are not legislation, i.e., written formal restrictions. They are what he called rules, constraints that everyone accepts in the shared commitment to collaboration and the pursuit of the most favorable outcomes.

The most significant of these rules at Valve is the “Rule Of Three”, a simple agreement that at least three individuals must agree on the initiation of a new project, or on other major decision points. The emergent standard was that this is just enough to prevent maverick behavior, and a low enough number to facilitate agile action that’s not bureaucratically constrained.

Another rule or constraint goes by the name of Social Proof. This is a broader and looser peer review standard. If the original team wishes to recruit more members, they must persuade others of the value generating potential of the project (in competition with other projects in the firm); successfully doing so constitutes “social proof” of value.

Rules-based peer review process replaces management structure.

Conventional approaches to organizational design focus on structure. This might be command-and-control hierarchy, or structured networks, or strategic business units or functional departments. Valve abandoned structural thinking and replaced it with flow analysis. How can we attract the most creative people to our venture? How can we encourage the most productive flows of bold creative thinking? How can teams best assemble and collaborate for the most productive output? How can we integrate with the user community in the best way? How can the most value-generative projects attract the best resources?

These are all questions about flow. Austrian economists are distinctive in viewing capital as a flow rather than a structure, and this view holds true for human capital just as much as physical capital. Emergent rules for self-organizing human systems can perform all the managerial functions that were historically left to control structures.

Actionable Insight Summary

  • Design your organization for flow not structure.
  • Design to attract the most entrepreneurial people in the most entrepreneurial roles (self-selection).
  • Let them self-organize.
  • Let rules and value codes emerge.
  • Teams as business units.
  • Eliminate the boundaries between the firm and customers and other partners.

Additional Resources

“The Future of Organizational Design” — our E4B Knowledge Graphic (PDF): Download PDF

“Levels without Bosses? Entrepreneurship and Valve’s Organizational Design” by Ulrich Möller and Matthew McCaffrey: View Paper

“Entrepreneurship and Firm Strategy: Integrating Resources, Capabilities, and Judgment through an Austrian Framework” by Ulrich Möller and Matthew McCaffrey: View Paper

The US Is Compounding Its Shortfalls In Innovation. Make Sure That In Your Business – And In Your Life – You Are Compounding Positively.

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Curt Carlson, the world’s leading authority on innovation and how to implement it, worries that the US is under-performing on this front – badly. 

On LinkedIn, he writes:

Almost all measures of innovative performance today are wanting.  Only 3% of patents recoup their investment; the rest are mostly waste that costs many tens of billions of dollars a year just in maintenance fees.  Only one in ten new venture-backed companies has any real success.  Most venture capitalists lose money, and 5% make 95% of the gains.  Only 20% of university tech-transfer programs break even, and those few are often the result of a new drug.  In our workshops with almost a thousand global teams from leading companies, universities, and government agencies, typically, only 25% of the projects under development would provide any meaningful new customer value if completed.  

This issue profoundly affects civilizational progress and quality of life. Innovation is value-creation and value-creation improves society for all.

Through innovation we address society’s grand challenges, create prosperity and jobs, and provide resources for social responsibility.  Consequently, one of society’s most critical opportunities is to improve our value-creation capabilities.  Improvements in value creation are exponential amplifiers of innovative performance.

He applies the term exponential in a carefully considered way. There is the opportunity for rapid, accelerated advance from where we are today to where we could be tomorrow. Problems can be solved quickly. Conditions we experience as disappointing or even dismal can become uplifting and exciting in a short period of time.

That is, if we are innovating and generating new value.

The opposite is also true, however. Compounding works in reverse. If we fall behind, the distance we have to go to recover becomes exponentially longer. If this year, we realize only 50% of our value creation potential, then next year or in the next relevant period, we’ll have 50% of the resources we would otherwise have had, and we’ll drop to 25% of potential, and so on and so on. The shortfall compounds and our level of performance declines exponentially.

Professor Per Bylund of Oklahoma State University has the same concern about our country’s economic under-performance. He gives a name to the gap between the value that’s actually created by entrepreneurial businesses and what could have been created: The Unrealized. In his book The Seen, The Unseen, And The Unrealized, he describes this value generation shortfall in economic terms, and attributes it to government regulation. Whether in the form of legislation or bureaucratic rule-making, regulation distorts the market, redirecting entrepreneurial creativity into channels favored by politicians and government departments, or curtailing it with enforcement rules, or prohibiting it entirely in some cases. The regulated economy simply can’t evolve and grow in the same way it would if unhampered.

The Unrealized is, similarly, a compounding problem. The number of regulations increases each year, so The Unrealized expands and grows each year. If the economy grew at only 50% of its potential in a base year, then the next year is constrained in the base from which it grows, and this negative compounding extends annually into the future, forever. Since regulation has been with us for a couple of centuries, the compounding of The Unrealized is incalculably high. We simply can’t imagine the dimensions of what could have been. 

Einstein famously said about compound interest that it “is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it…..he who doesn’t….pays it”.

Unsurprisingly, given the source, this is a very important observation. Compounding can work for us or against us. Saving and investing and re-investing can compound in our favor. Interacting more and more with smarter and smarter people can compound in our favor. Iterating a creative idea in critical forums can compound its innovativeness and applicability until it breaks into the market. Exercising and healthy eating every day can compound for us as we age, making us relatively more and more healthy than our age cohort and standard norms. 

The same is true on the negative side. As Einstein said, if we don’t earn compound interest, we pay it. If we get into debt, interest is working against us, especially if we borrow more and more. If we are not continuously engaged with other smart people and iterating our ideas with them, we are less and less likely to make a creative breakthrough. And if we permit ourselves to avoid fitness activities and if we eat an unhealthy diet every day, we are making things worse for ourselves at compounding rates. Every day we are a little less healthy and fit than we could have been – every daily sugar intake, or alcohol intake or cigarette smoke intake compounds, so that, every day, the impact of unfitness and bad diet is a little more harmful on our less-fit body than it would otherwise have been.

Curt Carlson and Per Bylund teach us to concern ourselves with the compounding of The Unrealized in value generation activities. We should bear this in mind – and, at the same time, make sure that compounding is working for us in our personal and family life.

132. Saifedean Ammous on Knowledge Entrepreneurship

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Saifedean Ammous is a knowledge entrepreneur. He creates new knowledge that’s valued by his customers, because it helps them to think better and better informs their actions. He carefully appraises the knowledge provided by great thinkers of the past, and re-presents in a newly compelling fashion. He develops effective memes and ideas. He innovates in channels and distribution. He demonstrates how knowledge entrepreneurship can work in the 21st Century’s globally-connected and digitally-connected economy. He joins the Economics For Business podcast to share some of his learnings and experiences

Download The Episode Resource “Knowledge Entrepreneurship” (PDF) – Download

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

Collect available knowledge then develop a new perspective.

Saifedean took degrees in economics and engineering, at bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. levels. His accumulated knowledge was valid for the university professor track. Then his spontaneous knowledge accumulation efforts took him to Austrian economics and a new perspective: that the economics he had learned to date didn’t make any sense, and that regime higher education was best understood as just another malinvestment. Most importantly, regime higher education was customer-less: it did not provide value for customers, because that was not its purpose. From that point on, Saifedean followed the path of customer sovereignty and of exploring what customers identified as valuable.

Teaching is value generation.

Saifedean’s first customers were students in his university classes. He was able to generate value for his students by teaching them the economics they wanted to learn, along with giving them the optionality of seeing the knowledge through his distinctive perspective. When students engage and say thank you, it’s a signal of value.

A transformative event precipitated a shift into independent knowledge entrepreneurship.

In Saifedean’s case, the transformative event was Bitcoin, the study of which opened up a deeper understanding of hard money and low time preference. He “upgraded” to the Bitcoin Standard by exiting academic teaching and switching to entrepreneurial knowledge sharing. The first step was writing and publishing a book called the Bitcoin Standard (conventionally published by Wiley) and then leaving academia for the joys of hard money.

He switched his platform for teaching from the university to the internet, and now is able to reach many more customers — citizens of the world who want to learn more about Austrian economics and to understand Bitcoin and hard money. How did he know they were out there? They self-selected via Saifedean’s twitter feed.

The “factory” for knowledge production and distribution is a website.

A fairly basic website (i.e., not requiring any technological expertise or gear that is not available to everyone) is the platform for the new level of knowledge entrepreneurship. At saifedean.com, customers have been able to:

  • Receive and read book chapters as they are written;
  • Access video and audio online courses in Austrian economics;
  • Buy books;
  • Subscribe to podcasts (which he runs like a seminar);
  • Find a “complete central bank replacement pack”.

Saifedean told us he is just getting started, and there are more knowledge innovations in the pipeline.

The Entrepreneurial Method.

This unfolding timeline is an excellent example of the entrepreneurial method at work.

  • Start with what you know.
  • Find motivation in what you are passionate about.
  • Utilize available resources.
  • Let collaborators and customers self-select in.
  • Use networking and influencers rather than conventional advertising and marketing to drive expansion.
  • Let spontaneous order unfold.

In addition, Saifedean associates the Austrian concept of lowering time preference with entrepreneurial success. Low time preference — willingness to save/sacrifice in the short terms for benefit in the longer term — is an essential part of the entrepreneurial method. One of the entrepreneur’s “bird-in-the-hand” resources is their individual utilization and allocation of their personal time and effort.

A new age of entrepreneurship is emerging and surging.

In The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean looks back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a period of technological innovation by entrepreneurs under the gold standard, bringing us indoor plumbing, electricity, the internal combustion engine, airplanes and elevators, among many more. Entrepreneurs were able to accumulate capital in the form of wealth stored in hard money to finance their innovations.

He believes that the emerging Bitcoin Standard era will precipitate a new entrepreneurial flourishing, further accelerated by free software, network access, blockchain and hard money savings.

Additional Resources

“Knowledge Entrepreneurship” — our E4B Process Map (PDF): Download PDF

Saifedean.com

The Bitcoin Standard (in over 20 language translations) 

The Principles Of Economics 

The Fiat Standard 

“Austrian School vs. Neoclassical School” (PDF): Download PDF

Twitter for Saifedean.com: @Saifedean

Twitter for Saifedean Ammous: @SaifedeanAmmou6