Is it entrepreneurship so good for us?

Entrepreneurship is fashionable

Entrepreneurship has been fashionable during the last years. During this time, many people has considered entrepreneurship as a solution to overcome unemployment problems, as many people lost their jobs and were not able to get a new one again. 

As many people say, entrepreneurship can create new economic activities, new and better products and services and new jobs where existing businesses and public administration can't. Instead of being reactive employees, who have a job created by someone else, entrepreneurs are looking for new opportunities to create new added value that no one else is trying. This new added value can be converted into new knowledge and technology, that can allow to our economy increase its competitiveness. 

The prove of this explanation could be found in the young IT companies, that have appeared recently out of nowhere and now are powerful and part of our lives. Hence we have Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and other important companies.

Google headquarters in Silicon Valley. Maybe you have reached this posts using its browser

More entrepreneurship, poorer

Entrepreneurship is fine according to the reasons exposed above, but we can't think that it can solve magically our unemployment, public and private debt and wages devaluation  problems. Entrepreneurship should be vocational, not a desperate solution for unemployed people. 

Hence an interesting statistic. The richer is a country, the less entrepreneurship rate has, and the poorer it is, the more entrepreneurship has. The United States, the country where the IT companies mentioned above are from, has a entrepreneurship ratio of 7,5%, while Bangladesh, a poor country known by its really bad work conditions, has a ratio of 75%. 

That means that just 7,5% of the total active population of the United States is entrepreneur. One could think that many americans are founders of any of those young and dynamic IT companies, but the most of them are employees. 


Start a business if you have a dream, not a need
 
I believe in entrepreneurship. It can help one to be more proactive and act according to his values, interests and talent. I think that entrepreneurship is more inclusive than labour market, because the important fact is the product or service we offer more than our personal features, like age, gender or ethnicity. 

Nevertheless, I think that entrepreneurship principles can bring prosperity to a country only if those who consider to start a business are motivated for the dream to launch their own project, that can detect a latent need and bring an improvement to the society.

It won't bring prosperity if people do it to survive, exhausting all their savings and offering products and services that many others are offering.