| Peter Klein |
Some of you have heard me suggest — at least half seriously — that we ban the word “entrepreneurship” from scientific discourse. The word has so many definitions that its use often obfuscates rather than clarifies. (If you mean self-employment, better to say say “self-employment”; if you mean opportunity discovery, say “opportunity discovery”; and so on.)
Yoram Barzel (right) listens to Harold Demsetz.
Harold Demsetz gave an interesting and entertaining presentation yesterday at ISNIE, in a session honoring Yoram Barzel on his 80th birthday. Demsetz’s remarks made me wonder if we should ban “firm” as well. Demsetz pointed out, quite rightly, that Coase (1937) defines the firm in terms of the employment relation. A one-person operation, in this definition, is not a firm, and vertical integration deals with the question of adding producers of intermediate products to the firm’s employment roll. Demsetz thinks independent contractors are…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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