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.Of course I would not be surprised to find the same fellow, once his book came out, bemoaning why there were not long lines to purchase his book at Barnes and Noble.But even then it occurred to me that no entrepreneur would think that way.No entrepreneur would go into the business of, say, selling soap without first asking, “Who are my consumers? How can I best satisfy their wants and needs?”The most creative, and ultimately the most highly rewarded, entrepreneurs are those who carry empathy beyond meeting the demand of others.Instead, they are the ones who envision the wants and needs of others even before they have them.Many years ago, at a Forbes CEO conference, I met Akio Morita, the inventor of the Sony Walkman.Morita told me that before he thought of the idea, no one had requested a music box that was small, portable, and allowed for individual listening through earphones.No one even knew that would be a good idea.Morita said he got the idea himself when he took his family to the beach and had to endure the awful music that emanated from the boom boxes of teenagers.Morita asked his engineers to figure out a way to shrink a car radio so that people could hear their favorite music without inflicting it on others.The Sony Walkman was a huge success.Here is “supply side” economics in its classic form.Demand does not precede supply; supply precedes demand.The genius of Morita—this old Japanese man—was to recognize what millions of American young people wanted even though they had no idea they wanted it until it was made and offered to them.I give the example of the Sony Walkman but I could just as easily have mentioned Facebook, Federal Express, or the iPhone.I could add very simple inventions, like roll-on luggage.I don’t know who thought of that one, but I do know that for decades people went around airports lugging huge suitcases, until someone got the bright idea to put wheels on them.In each of these cases, entrepreneurs created demand by introducing a product that no one asked for, but millions of people wanted it once it was available.I call this “extreme empathy” because it’s a case of entrepreneurs providing for the wants of consumers before consumers even know what they want.For these entrepreneurs—and entrepreneurs in general—profit is not a measure of how greedy or selfish they are.Profit is a measure of how well they have served the wants and needs of their customers.In his book The Passions and the Interests, Albert Hirschman shows how capitalism, far from being a system of theft and looting, arose historically as an alternative to theft and looting.In fact, capitalism was built on a human proclivity entirely different from the desire to rob and pillage.Hirschman notes that in the ancient world—and even today, in many parts of the world—wealth was obtained by looting and conquest.If your group or tribe wanted possessions, you simply seized them.The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power.This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.According to Hirschman, the early modern thinkers who advocated capitalism recognized this passion as destructive but also powerful.They also knew that merely preaching against it might not be sufficient.So they sought to curb or check the desire for conquest by opposing to it an equally powerful desire: the desire to accumulate.In their view, the “passion” for predatory conquest could be mitigated, and ultimately eliminated, by the “interest” in capitalist accumulation.Hirschman quotes Montesquieu’s words, from the Spirit of the Laws: “It is fortunate for men to be in a situation in which, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.” In both cases there is acquisition, but in the former case it is violent, involuntary, and socially harmful; in the latter it is peaceful, consensual, and socially productive.14In other words, capitalism civilizes greed in the same way that marriage civilizes lust.Greed, like lust, is part of the human condition.These emotions cannot be eradicated, although some monkish sects have certainly tried [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]