Page 266 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

53231_Innovation and Entrepreneurship.qxd 11/8/2002 10:50 AM Page 259

Conclusion: The Entrepreneurial Society 259

of impotence, their fears, their sense of being caught will lead them to
resist all innovation—as is already the case in Great Britain (or in the
U.S. Postal Service). The job has been done before—by the Mitsui
Zaibatsu of Japan in the sharp Japanese Depression after the
RussoJapanese war of 1906, by the Swedes after World War II in the
deliberate policy which converted a country of subsistence farmers and
forest workers into an industrialized and highly prosperous nation. And
the numbers are, as already said, not very large—especially as we need
not concern ourselves overmuch with the one-third of the group that is
fifty-five years old and older and has available adequate early-retirement
provisions, and with another third that is under thirty years of age and
capable of moving and of placing themselves. But the policy to train and
place the remaining one-third—a small but hard core—of displaced
“smokestack” workers has yet to be worked out.
2. The other social innovation needed is both more radical and
more difficult and unprecedented: to organize the systematic aban-
donment of outworn social policies and obsolete public-service insti-
tutions. This was not a problem in the last great entrepreneurial era;
a hundred years ago there were few such policies and institutions.
Now we have them in abundance. But by now we also know that few
if any are for ever. Few of them even perform more than a fairly short
time.
One of the fundamental changes in world view and perception of
the last twenty years—a truly monumental turn—is the realization
that governmental policies and agencies are of human rather than of
divine origin, and that therefore the one thing certain about them is
that they will become obsolete fairly fast. Yet politics is still based on
the age-old assumption that whatever government does is grounded in
the nature of human society and therefore “forever.” As a result there
is no political mechanism so far to slough off the old, the outworn, the
no-longer-productive in government.
Or rather what we have is not working yet. In the United States
there has lately been a rash of “sunset laws,” which prescribe that a
governmental agency or a public law lapse after a certain period of time
unless specifically re-enacted. These laws have not worked, however—
in part because there are no objective criteria as to when an agency or
a law becomes dysfunctional; in part because there is so far no organ-
ized process of abandonment; but perhaps mostly because we have not
yet learned to develop new or alternative methods for achieving what
an ineffectual law or agency was originally supposed to achieve.