Enron’s revolution-always approach to energy in its latter years was Schumpeter on steroids. Adding to the company tumult was another complicating factor: Enron’s business model was dependent on political, not free-market, capitalism.
In early 2001, Enron founder and chairman Ken Lay proclaimed a new corporate vision: to become the world’s leading company. But this goal was not about beating oil majors like ExxonMobil or Chevron at their game. It was about mandatory open-access with gas and electricity transmission to trade the commodities; reducing tax bills with solar and wind investments (what GE does today with what was once Enron Wind); developing infrastructure in risky countries with government-guaranteed financing; and more.
Enron’s Business Guru
Lay’s super-Schumpeterian view of business strategy drew upon Peter Drucker’s The Age of Discontinuity, which Professor Lay taught to his graduate economics students at George Washington University in the early 1970s.…
Ed. Note: Occasional posts at MasterResource include big-picture entries on key social science thinkers that are relevant to understand dynamic market capitalism versus its opposite, political capitalism. This entry examines a leading twentieth-century thinker whose work continues to frame many debates in applied economics and political economy.
Brilliant, blithe, eclectic, and obsessive, the immaculately attired, aristocratic scholar [Joseph Schumpeter] captured the essence of entrepreneurial capitalism and introduced the terms “creative destruction” and “business strategy.”
– Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, p. 100.
“I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.”
…– Joseph Schumpeter, as recalled by student M.
“If resources are not fixed but created, then the nature of the scarcity problem changes dramatically. For the technological means involved in the use of resources determines their creation and therefore the extent of their scarcity. The nature of the scarcity is not outside the process (that is natural), but a condition of it.”
– Tom DeGregori (1987). “Resources Are Not; They Become: An Institutional Theory.” Journal of Economic Issues, p. 1258.
The confounding of physics with economics has plagued a real-world understanding of mineral resource development. The phenomenon of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics rule in their domain. But there is no economic law analogous to the physical conservation of matter. There is no law of conservation of value; value is continually, routinely created by the market process.…