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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 10 of 27
The argument in favor of an entrepreneurial private sector, devoted to making profit by investing money, more or less modified by social accounting that counts contributions to the community and to the environment as just as much a part of the bottom line as profit-making, is pragmatic and empirical. Coraggio belongs to the school of thought in the social sciences known as institutionalism. He thinks of economies as arrangements people make to serve their needs. (28) For an institutionalist, the questions whether and when entrepreneurs should be encouraged, what the laws governing corporations should be, and so on, are questions about socially constructed realities. It is metaphysical nonsense to talk about eternal property rights, or an eternal absence of property rights, or eternal contract rights, or an eternal absence of contract rights, decreed by God, or defined by Platonic ideas, or constituting the furniture of the universe, or commanded by categorical imperatives, or pre-existing the social contract that founded society in a state of nature. The reasons for supporting an entrepreneurial sector --even while recognizing that it alone will never solve all of society’s problems—are down to earth. Private for-profit business often in practice delivers the goods for workers and for consumers.
Entrepreneurs, regarded as ideal types playing a characteristic social role, rationally calculate ways to accumulate money. In the process, they find efficient ways to get things done. That is their social function, viewed in a positive light. Some other class of people, driven by some other motive, guided by some other logic, might, in principle, perform this function just as well or better. Historically, most observers agree, without entrepreneurs humanity could not have achieved the high levels of productivity that have made it possible in modern times for some people to live in comfort, and for most people to live in less discomfort than was the case in previous ages. (29)
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