Do We Need More Entrepreneurship? Telos, Task Demand, and the Limits of a Valorized Form

This conceptual paper asks whether the undifferentiated promotion of entrepreneurship is warranted, and argues that it is not. Entrepreneurship is among the least contested commitments of contemporary institutions: governments subsidize venture creation, universities build incubators, development agencies fund microenterprise, and business schools treat entrepreneurship as a core offering whose desirability is settled rather than argued. Existing critiques have shown that founders’ returns are often low, that the median new firm is marginal, that entrepreneurial effort can be socially unproductive, and that entrepreneurship functions as ideology. None supplies a general criterion for when promotion is warranted. The paper argues that the criterion is missing for a structural reason: in the justification the promotional apparatus offers for itself, read as an ideal type, novelty functions simultaneously as value and as ultimate end, a collapse of axiology into telos that leaves no standpoint from which costs can be weighed. Those costs fall unevenly on employees, suppliers, founders, and society, and the folk theory of the better mousetrap presents them as deserved. Drawing on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity, applied to the task demands of ventures rather than to persons, and on the economics of appropriability, expected value, and market structure, the paper proposes a band within which entrepreneurial promotion is justified. It extends the argument to who is encouraged and where entrepreneurship is taught, concedes a bounded role for entrepreneurship in institutionally thin contexts, and proposes a telos-gated heuristic for judging when promotion is warranted.