Cooking as entrepreneurship
Cooking, entrepreneurship theory, and Austrian economics have a lot more in common than many people might believe. In honor of the late, great Julia Child, the Circle Bastiat's contributors have written a piece combining the three.
Cooking, entrepreneurship theory, and Austrian economics have a lot more in common than many people might believe. In honor of the late, great Julia Child, the Circle Bastiat's contributors have written a piece combining the three.
To honor Julia Child on her 100th birthday,聽Lynne Kiesling聽writes a nice post combining three of my favorite things: cooking, entrepreneurship theory, and Austrian economics. Good cooking is about the combination of heterogeneous resources, it requires experimentation and creativity, and it either works or it doesn鈥檛. Most important:
This emphasis on error correction highlights one of my聽differences with Kirzner鈥檚 approach to entrepreneurship. In Kirzner鈥檚 system, which emphasizes entrepreneurship as a coordinating agency, the entrepreneur is modeled as 鈥減iercing the fog鈥� of uncertainty 鈥� hence the familiar metaphor of entrepreneurship as the discovery of preexisting profit opportunities. My approach focuses on action, not discovery, and gives a larger role to uncertainty. What generates coordination, in this approach, is the entrepreneurial selection process, not the 鈥渃orrectness鈥� of entrepreneurial decisions.
Incidentally, Saras Sarasvathy often uses cooking to illustrate her 鈥渆ffectual鈥� approach to entrepreneurial decision-making (i.e., cooks don鈥檛 always follow a recipe to produce a known dish, but use the ingredients they have in a sequential, experimental process). And for more on food, see聽here聽and聽here.