By William Damon, Mar. 25, 2014, Defining Ideas
Entrepreneurship has played a decisive role in American identity
and aspirations, but it is a role marked both by uncertainty and longing.
Ronald Reagan, who spoke fondly of a "nation of entrepreneurs,"
referred to entrepreneurs as "forgotten heroes." He remarked that
"we rarely hear about them. But look into the heart of America, and you’ll
see them. They’re the owners of that store down the street . . . the brave
people everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and invest in the
future to build a better America."
We
do hear a lot about them today, at least about those who have created the
enterprises that have filled the world with computing and communications
devices and seem to be literally minting money in the process. Economic
prognosticators see entrepreneurship as the main—no, perhaps the sole—pathway
to a prosperous future. One labor expert quoted by New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman asserts that successful job candidates these days
need to be "inventors and solution-finders who are relentlessly entrepreneurial."
The days of large labor forces with places for every good steady worker are
vanishing fast. As many news outlets have noted, one recent canary in the mine
is the valuation of a 55-employee company (Whatsapp) at nineteen billion
dollars. It does not take many salaried jobs to run many of our emerging
companies, a reality that future workers may need to adapt to by becoming
entrepreneurs themselves.
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