Rewriting the history of small business: What you didn't know
(Read article summary)The standard narrative is too simplistic about the role, origins, and impact of entrepreneurship. But the closer you look, the fuzzier it gets, finds guest blogger Dane Stangler.
The standard narrative about the American economy in the late twentieth century typically runs as follows: after four decades of quasi-statist capitalism (the 1940s through the 1970s) that brought the United States to the brink of economic ruin, the economy experienced an entrepreneurial explosion around 1980. The economy moved from the dull bureaucratic capitalism of the "Organization Man" to the exciting entrepreneurial capitalism of high-technology and, accordingly, more robust growth and productivity. Without questioning the importance of entrepreneurship to economic growth, I'm beginning to wonder about this.
For starters, let's take recent technological history. The information technology revolution that is associated with the 1980s and 1990s was born in the 1950s and 1960s, emerging out of government-funded research performed at universities and large company laboratories. We could probably mark the start of the IT revolution at the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor 1957 or, perhaps, the founding of Intel in 1968; Microsoft and Apple followed in the mid-1970s. Other companies typically associated with this entrepreneurial rebirth include FedEx and Southwest Airlines, which were also started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even within the confines of the conventional narrative outlined above, we can trace the roots of entrepreneurial capitalism to the final stages of bureaucratic capitalism, a pattern that aligns with other models of technological revolutions and transitions. In his wonderful book, The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey (who is now a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation), connects the counter-cultural ethos of the 1960s with the subsequent entrepreneurial revolution in business.
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