Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
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Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#2Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon.
For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dynamics in the entrepreneurial sector, saying "this is an example of Veblenian Entrepreneurship!" doesn't communicate anything. Most of the writing that actually influenced the field use terms that are understandable and communicable build on terms already understood by practitioners, like minimum viable product or strategic inflection point. Making an argument with a whole bunch of jargon like "Ideology of Entepreneurialsm" or "Veblenian" just means anyone that wants to engage with the text has to go look up a bunch of random terms to figure out that you're referencing some 1800s era economist that coined the term "conspicuous consumption." It also makes you wonder if this level of being divorced from the actual practice impacts the analysis and if the findings are based on an actual understanding of the field or just an academic bubble. If, as they say at the end of the paper, this should be used as a catalyst to change entrepreneurship education- I wonder if they understand first how many people start companies because they majored in entrepreneurship, and second if they understand just how accessible this terminology and jargon is and if it would be getting in the way of making actual impact on curriculums
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#3Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dyn…
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Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#4Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dyn…
TBF this is an academic article though. Why should total accessibility of language to non-experts be a goal in that venue exactly? Isn't it reasonable to expect that other educated people will check the citations?
Also in this case it looks like the authors are from business schools. Business buzzwords are a well known and common absurdity. On the other hand, I might be freaked out if random names for stuff started coming out of logic or maths circles.
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#5It's weird to see stuff like this published as a "paper", as if it were a scientific endeavour, when there doesn't seem to be any experiment, mathematics, or even data involved. Just a lot of conjecture sprinkled with citations. It seems like the epitome of Feynman's cargo cult science. I'm actually very sympathetic with the idea being advanced, I'm just not sure what really separates this and a blog post.
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#6Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dyn…
FWIW, I am only interested in economics as a hobby, and I knew immediately what Veblenian meant. It's a pretty common reference in the field.
I think you raise a valid point about the impact of overly academic work, but I also think it's not unreasonable for academics to expect that their primary audience will have a passing familiarity with the major figures in the field.
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#7Ouch. But it also seems that the quality of research is falling? I guess it's cause I come from a technical field but a paper with a bunch of text, citations, and a general concept can be called research in the business field? Is it any wonder there is so much bs out there?
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#8Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dyn…
What you are demonstrating is one of many ironies that one can see in academic writing. Here, the writing criticizes the rise of Veblenian entrepreneurship and the fall of innovation entrepreneurship, but ironically, this kind of a paper could be considered an instance of Veblenian entrepreneurship!
Perhaps that could be because Veblenian entrepreneurship, like most entrepreneurship, is made possible through higher margins. I always parade out this 2S Ventures post about the importance of margins [1] because it really drives the point home. On the contrary, "innovation" based businesses require a large variety of environmental factors to succeed, ranging from cultural ones to regulatory and logistic ones. And there is indeed no guarantee that an innovative business is necessarily one with higher gross margins than an incumbent whose products/services it would seek to unseat even if there is societal benefit, so the business may not intrinsically be attractive to investors.
So it is with this piece here. Its explanations of new business formation targeted at conspicuous consumption are targeted towards academics concerned with earlier explorations of these areas, rather than practitioners. I think the possibility of it being thought provoking for the first group while common sense for the second group is where the irony comes in -- presumably, it was intended to be the other way around!
[1] https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-...
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#9It's weird to see stuff like this published as a "paper", as if it were a scientific endeavour, when there doesn't seem to be any experiment, mathematics, or even data involved. Just a lot of conjecture sprinkled with citations. It seems like the epitome of Feynman's cargo cult science. I'm actually very sympathetic with the idea being advanced, I'm just not sure what really separates this and a blog post.
Historians write papers. As do philosophers and classicists. There are papers in literary criticism, law, music theory, and theology, and none of them have experiments, mathematics, or data (at least in the scientific sense of the word). I don't think that makes those endeavors invalid.
The difference between an academic paper and a blog post is that an academic paper needs to fit into the context of the academic literature through its format (particularly through citation of prior work), and it needs to undergo some form of peer review. None of that is any guarantee of quality, of course. There are lots of terrible academic papers and lots of excellent blog posts. But you don't need to be a scientist to write an academic paper.
Re: Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur (2019)
#10Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dyn…
do you not find it ironic that on a 'hacker entrepreneur' site that has played at least some small part in inspiring the culture of 'untrepreneurship'
(if only in a 'copycat' fashion, lest I insult anyone here)
that someone from outside the field of economics would complain about the lack of accessability of a formal paper in the field of economics to the 'average', 'casual' entrepreneur?
fairly certain this is kind of what they are getting at..
also:
'Ideology of Entepreneurialsm' is about as plain-english as you can get
'Veblenian' / the concept of 'conspicuous consumption' is fairly well known in pop culture, at least among the bourgeois/intellegensia/dropping-the latest-malcom-gladwell-or-thinker-du-jour-theory-over-cocktails set; i personally have encountered it many times in casual reading (e.g. time, economist, new yorker sorts of publications) and it was presented 2-3 times to me in various 101-level academic courses