The blog at The Independent Institute has been running short essays by John C. Goodman, the author of a recent book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis. The latest essay is Can Entrepreneurship Be Copied? where we can read Dr. Goodman’s claim:
In mathematics, Gödel’s Theorem says that no complex, axiomatic system can be both consistent and complete. What I am proposing is something similar for social science. Although some habits of highly successful people can be identified and copied, not enough of them can be copied for each of us to become highly successful ourselves through copycat behavior alone.
This is Goodman’s Nonreplicability Theorem.
I think the appeal to Gödel’s Theorem is questionable but his claim makes an important point about entrepreneurs being able to act in ways often mysterious to the rest of us, at least until the action is over. I also think Dr. Goodman misses something important. We must remember that a human being isn’t an individual so much as he’s a partially formed entity which is actively responding to his environments, at least to the extent he can be said to be a free and moral creature. Those environments include all the human communities, families and churches and neighborhood and sports leagues and so forth, as well as his physical environments such as a family farm or nearby forests or lakes or seashore or the ground which contains some mineral never before considered important.
The entrepreneur—indeed, as I said, any human being who is truly free and moral creatures—is what he is and is able to to do what he does because of his active and intelligent and morally well-ordered responses to those complex environments. The entrepreneur is particularly inclined to work in regions of uncertainty to satisfy needs or desires of others in some sort of marketplace. He’s a pioneer who may or may not settle down and establish himself as a fellow of great prosperity. He may even fail because he misinterpreted something in his environments or because he was unlucky or ended up competing against someone luckier or more capable. He differs from the rest of us in dealing better or at least more courageously with conditions of uncertainty and in responding to those conditions in such a way that he might add to some important aspect of the well-being of his communities.