LAUNCHPAD REPUBLIC

A comprehensive examination of the ways in which American entrepreneurs uniquely balance stability and volatility.

According to Wolk and Landry, the United States has distinguished itself as the greatest incubator of entrepreneurship in an age that’s defined by its ascendancy. At the heart of its exceptionalism, they say, has been its ability to sustain a delicate equilibrium between two countervailing forces: the creative disruption of bold innovation and the stability engendered by reliable protection of property rights: “The system encourages start-up ventures to enter or create markets by promising to respect the wealth that these entities create, free from government confiscation, even as the most successful of them become quite large and profitable.” This tension is the consequence of several factors, they write, including the nation’s political economy, which encourages competition, a “cultural bias” toward individual rights and liberty, decentralized government, and a constitutional system that, they assert, discourages monopolistic power and cronyism. Wolk and Landry sketch a remarkably thorough history of the nation to illustrate its commercial development—one that charts its course from its creation, due to revolutionary dissent, to the present day. Also, they thoughtfully reflect on the challenges to American entrepreneurial success today, which they aver has reached an “inflection point” in which concerns over inequality may cause a revision of the principles that they believe have made it so successful.

This wide-ranging study helpfully alternates between the practical and the theoretical. This isn’t a surprising narrative choice, as Wolk is a successful entrepreneur and Landry, an independent business historian. Over the course of this treatise, the authors propose a powerful thesis, and they scour many key institutional and cultural elements of American life to find evidence to substantiate it. Moreover, they acknowledge the great challenges that the nation faces today and the “big reset” that it could catalyze, including a “a rebalancing of the right to property and the right to compete and the role of government in mediating it.” Ultimately, the book concludes that the country has the resources to effectively manage any gathering storms of this nature and that it needs to reaffirm, with some reforms, the foundational principles that brought it success in the first place: “The United States is largely in control of its own economic destiny….Closely linked with the country’s form of democratic government and highly responsive to consumer preferences, the system has proved resilient and responsive, if also contentious and messy at times.” However, the final argument that the authors make for the continued success of the United States’ economic system, while upbeat, is not made with the same amount of exacting rigor as the rest of the study, and, as such, it may not be successful in convincing skeptics who might read this book. That said, the work as a whole is truly magisterial in its detail; the authors somehow manage to combine a granular account of the country’s entrepreneurial history with a general synopsis of its philosophical foundations.

An impressive study of a timely and important topic.