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Introduction 13

a tycoon. Yet he so totally mismanaged the businesses he started that he
had to be removed from every one of them to save it. Much, if not most
high tech is still being managed, or more accurately mismanaged,
Edison’s way.
This explains, first, why the high-tech industries follow the tradi-
tional pattern of great excitement, rapid expansion, and then sudden
shakeout and collapse, the pattern of “from rags to riches and back to
rags again” in five years. Most of Silicon Valley—but most of the new
biological high-tech companies as well—are still inventors rather
than innovators, still speculators rather than entrepreneurs. And this,
too, perhaps explains why high tech so far conforms to the
Kondratieff prediction and does not generate enough jobs to make the
whole economy grow again.
But the “low tech” of systematic, purposeful, managed entrepre-
neurship does.

V

Of all the major modern economists only Joseph Schumpeter con-
cerned himself with the entrepreneur and his impact on the economy.
Every economist knows that the entrepreneur is important and has
impact. But, for economists, entrepreneurship is a “meta-economic”
event, something that profoundly influences and indeed shapes the
economy without itself being part of it. And so too, for economists, is
technology. Economists do not, in other words, have any explanation
as to why entrepreneurship emerged as it did in the late nineteenth
century and as it seems to be doing again today, nor why it is limited
to one country or to one culture. Indeed, the events that explain why
entrepreneurship becomes effective are probably not in themselves
economic events. The causes are likely to lie in changes in values,
perception, and attitude, changes perhaps in demographics, in institu-
tions (such as the creation of entrepreneurial banks in Germany and
the United States around 1870), perhaps changes in education as well.
Something, surely, has happened to young Americans—and to fair-
ly large numbers of them—to their attitudes, their values, their ambi-
tions, in the last twenty to twenty-five years. Only it is clearly not what
anyone looking at the young Americans of the late 1960s could possibly
have predicted. How do we explain, for instance, that all of a sudden
there are such large numbers of people willing both to work like de