Arnold Kling has posted his second and third essays building off the recent book by Carl Schramm, The Entrepreneurial Imperative. I wrote a post on the first essay that addresses entrepreneurial capitalism earlier this week.
In his second essay, one of Kling's points deals with the importance of strong marriages and families in supporting entrepreneurship. Strong marriages to Kling are not just a social issue, but an economic one as well in our emerging entrepreneurial economy. Kling writes:
My one experience as an entrepreneur demonstrated the importance of a supportive spouse. At one point, I was ready to give up altogether, and my accountant, to whom I went for advice, was equally pessimistic. Only my wife thought I should try to keep the business going.Another point that Schramm makes is that in a dynamic economy, safety requires taking risk. Counting on a large employer to maintain your standard of living is ultimately an unsafe approach. At one point or another, most people are going to have to make career changes. One career possibility is starting your own business. Help from a spouse can be crucial. Some couples benefit by starting a business together. In other cases, the fact that one spouse continues earning a living enables the other spouse to launch a business that takes time to achieve profitability....
New businesses often fail, but many families are strong enough financially to survive such a failure. They simply pick themselves up and move on.
In his third essay, Kling looks at reforming education through the power choice brought about by entrepreneurial educators.
In my view, the key to improving education is removing entry barriers and allowing alternative schooling experiments to flourish. From this perspective, the politicians of both parties who are most strongly "pro-education" are in fact the biggest obstacles to improvement, since their policies serve only to entrench the educational establishment.
Well said. This has been a long-term interest of mine, and a topic that inspired me to write a book to help entrepreneurial educators who wish to create alternative educational settings that offer choices beyond the public schools. My book, From the Ground Up: Entrepreneurial School Leadership, offers a model to plan and develop alternative private and charter schools using the tools and techniques from the field of entrepreneurship.
