The End of the Empire that Entrepreneurship Built: How Seven Sources of Rot will Undo the West

The End of the Empire that Entrepreneurship Built argues that concerns about the collapse of the West need to be taken seriously and that there are at least seven sources of rot that affect how entrepreneurship, the builder of the West, continues to play a role in shaping society. To identify and analyze the sources of this rot, this monograph takes a somewhat different approach than has been taken so far in the literature by drawing parallels between the rot affecting the West and the rot that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In drawing the parallels with the Soviet Union, this work follows Chan's (2015) categorization of the five sources of rot that ended the Soviet Union and adds two further sources that are prominent in the West. These include increasing militarization; the ideological undermining of science; the disincentivizing of innovation; "technological conservatism"; a centralizing hierarchy that obstructed the horizontal flow of information; the end of the hydrocarbon age - the energy transition out of cheap fossil fuels; and the financialization of the economy - the bankers' takeover. These seven sources of rot are argued to be the main harbingers of the collapse of the West. Understanding these better may help inform the debate that is needed on succession planning so as to minimize the damages that can be caused by collapse, and moreover to manage post-collapse recovery.

The monograph is structured as follows. Section 2 explains why entrepreneurship has been the builder of the West's empire that arose roughly around the 1800s. Section 3 asks, does the fate of the Soviet Union await the West? This section also discusses the seven sources of rot. Section 4 draws together the conclusions from the discussion of these sources of rot to explain how they represent scenario spoilers for the optimistic scenarios of an entrepreneurial economy. Section 5 provides the conclusion.