The entrepreneur has been written out of economic theory. Let me explain:

• the dominance over the past century of the economics of the English speaking countries

• the absence of discussion of the entrepreneur in the economic literature written in English

• the meaning of “entrepreneur” comes from the French entreprendre which means to undertake and therefore entrepreneur in English is literally translated as “undertaker” which has its other more common meaning as someone who buries people for a living – a morbid connection

• interestingly as a sidelight, the German word to undertake is unternehmen and therefore the German for entrepreneur is Unternehmer but in this case with none of the morbid connectivity of English

• Mill in 1848 was discussing the need for an English equivalent of entrepreneur and lamented that no such term existed

• Schumpeter’s notion of an entrepreneur embeds innovation

• the Rothbardian version of an entrepreneur is someone who exploits opportunities others have overlooked

• the meaning that is missing with such overtones is the plain notion of an entrepreneur as a factor of production that exists along with land, labour and capital – someone who runs a business and brings the other factors together in a productive profit making enterprise

• all such entrepreneurs are almost certainly creative in their own way, some more than others, but it is the notion of the organiser of a business that is needed

• economic theory has, however determined that it must follow physics in depending on external non-human forces, such as demand or utility with human decision making almost invisible

• the use of MC=MR as the profit-maximising position is almost paradigmatic in that no actual human decision making is visible other than to follow the dots to the highest possible profit

• although this is the essence of the theory of the firm, what is omitted is the possibility of novelty and innovation

• an innovative entrepreneur is inconsistent with economics as physics since it opens up the possibility of discontinuity

• discontinuity via innovation makes mathematically-based economics a limited approach to understanding the dynamics of economic change since the future cannot be expected to be like the past.