The place of entrepreneurship in “The Economics that Might Have Been”
指出新古典经济学难以容纳创业，借鉴凡勃伦对累积因果的批判，论证演化理论能更好解释创新性创业在技术和制度变迁中的作用。
It is a familiar observation that entrepreneurship is not easily accommodated within the framework of neoclassical economic theory. Drawing inspiration from an ancient critique of neoclassicism by Veblen (Q J Econ 12(4):373–397, 1898), this paper attributes the difficulty to the tension between normative accounts of decision making (as in mainstream theory) and ideas of causation that are standard in the sciences. Normative theories naturally privilege the conjectured future over the experienced past in the quest for explanatory factors. Evolutionary theories elucidate instead the mechanisms of “cumulative causation” (Veblen) that perpetually produce the present from the past. Entrepreneurship of the innovative (Schumpeterian) kind seizes opportunities that emerge in complex, evolving contexts of technological and institutional change. A theory that gives due weight to cumulative causation sheds greater light on these processes than prevailing mainstream theory can, and that is a key advantage of an evolutionary theory.