do entrepreneurs serve as pawns for economic development?
3-: I think you're generally along the right lines. I can offer a different explanation. Most of my own thesis comes from reading Eisenstein's "Ascent of Humanity", though I've put a little of my spin on it.The basis of civilization - the good and the bad - comes down to our concepts of money and property. I'm only going to speak of the bad here.Money earns interest, hence if you have it you are compelled to hold on to it; as well, because it compounds, a quick cash grab may theoretically exceed the return of any sustainable venture.Property, on the other hand, makes us seek to control our world so that others can't. It started with land, but it's spread to just about everything, including abstract concepts.Most competitive forces can be attributed to this volatile combination.But the entrepreneur's motives may differ from competition; instead of grabbing money and holding on to it, or taking other people's land, resourcefulness and efficiency is another goal, and it is usually the one that produces the most successful businesses.What civilization has done is to use money and property as proxies for efficiency, which for the entrepreneur encourages all negative externalities, and for society as a whole causes a lot of deep rifts and strife.But I think that, ultimately, technology - by increasingly giving power to all individuals - is going to make the money and property concepts irrelevant. It's already doing so online, albeit with a lot of friction because we have to use side-channels to translate online "currencies" (popularity, utility, reputation) into money.