Entrepreneurs Aren’t Government Calculators

Updated: 2025.08.27 1M ago 1 sources
Treating founders as utility maximizers who reliably chase subsidies ignores their core edge: imagination and judgment in uncertainty. Trying to 'program' innovators with incentives risks attracting poseurs and crowding out real discovery. — It challenges the microfoundations of activist industrial policy that assume precise incentive design can substitute for decentralized experimentation.

Sources

The Industrial Policy Debate of 2016: Zhang Weiying on Entrepreneurs and Innovation (Part 2)
Thomas des Garets Geddes 2025.08.27 100% relevant
Zhang’s line that entrepreneurs act through 'imagination, acumen and judgement,' not as manipulable 'calculators.'
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