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Conclusion: The Entrepreneurial Society 263

And these invisible governmental overheads are totally unproduc-
tive. Does anyone, for instance, believe that tax accountants con-
tribute to national wealth or to productivity, and altogether add to
society’s well-being, whether material, physical or spiritual? And
yet in every developed country government mandates misallocation
of a steadily growing portion of our scarcest resource, able, diligent,
trained people, to such essentially sterile pursuits.
It may be too much to hope that we can arrest—let alone excise—
the cancer of government’s invisible costs. But at least we should be
able to protect the new entrepreneurial venture against it.
We need to learn to ask in respect to any proposed new govern-
mental policy or measure: Does it further society’s ability to innovate?
Does it promote social and economic flexibility? Or does it impede and
penalize innovation and entrepreneurship? To be sure, impact on soci-
ety’s ability to innovate cannot and should not be the determining, let
alone the sole criterion. But it needs to be taken into consideration
before a new policy or a new measure is enacted—and today it is not
taken into account in any country (except perhaps in Japan) or by any
policy maker.

V

THE INDIVIDUAL IN ENTREPRENEURIAL
SOCIETY
In an entrepreneurial society individuals face a tremendous chal-
lenge, a challenge they need to exploit as an opportunity: the need for
continuous learning and relearning.
In traditional society it could be assumed—and was assumed—that
learning came to an end with adolescence or, at the latest, with adult-
hood. What one had not learned by age twenty-one or so, one would
never learn. But also what one had learned by age twenty-one or so one
would apply, unchanged, the rest of one’s life. On these assumptions
traditional apprenticeship was based, traditional crafts, traditional pro-
fessions, but also the traditional systems of education and the schools.
Crafts, professions, systems of education, and schools are still, by and
large, based on these assumptions. There were, of course, always
exceptions, some groups that practiced continuous learning and
relearning: the great artists and the great scholars, Zen monks, mystics,