Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Entrepreneurship in Liberia

I have recently mentioned that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, which implies entrepreneurship classes have little value. What should these entrepreneurship professors then do? Do research on entrepreneurship? It turns out that is also of questionable value.

Case in point, the latest paper of Johan Venter. He wants to understand how entrepreneurship emergences in post-conflict economies and lead to new jobs. To this end, he travels to Liberia and surveys ... entrepreneurship professors who, of course, testify about strong interest in entrepreneurship classes. Never mind that taking such classes has no impact on entrepreneurship outcomes, Venter concludes that entrepreneurship should get more emphasis throughout the curriculum. That came out of nowhere, or rather out of a pitiful survey with 28 respondents.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

At what point do we propose a rule of refusing even to discuss, let alone publish, papers with fewer than x data points?

Kansan said...

One can test for significance...