Q: How has the entrepreneur emerged as the powerhouse to the global economy?

A: How? HOW?!?

Don't you mean to be asking, "WHY did it RE-emerge?"

In the first place, it never went away. For most of the world for most of history all commerce is and was done by individual people trading what they had or what they could do with each other.

There have been a few anolomolies in history... burps in the flow of economic history where humans congealed into large collective groups.

The latest one of most note to westerners was the concentration of human work into huge structures called corporations that peaked in the 1950's, at which point most people in Japan, the US, and Western Europe worked for large corporations.

But then the shareholders of those corporations pushed for ways to have more of the profits of those corporations spent as dividends rather than worker-salaries, and so a tremendous push for automation was engaged.

First to be pushed back on the streets of entrepreneurism were factory laborers who's jobs could be replaced by machinery... called the period of "automation".

Next, computers and software enabled upper-management to do more of the information gathering and processing for decisions, which led to massive layoffs of middle-management in the 1990's... called the period of "downsizing". Like their predecesors on the assembly line, those middle-managers were now turfed onto the streets of entrepreneurism.

To say that "entrepreneurism is the powerhouse" of the global economy is a misaligned question for several reasons:

1) It implies that entrepreneurs never were the "power house". For most of the planet for most of the time, person-to-person trade has and was the norm, therefore is and always was the "powerhouse" for most humans for most of the time.

2) It implies that big corporations are not still a "powerhouse". Yes they are, as much as ever. They just don't hire as many people to do the same amount of work.

In fact, corporate power has even extended into what used to be the bastion of free enterprise labour... the farm. Now there are fewer people working in farming than there ever has been, while corporations use automated "factory-farm" systems that used to employ humans.

The question, of course, is: What are all those layed of, "entrepreneur powerhouses of the new world economy" going to do to pay for that food, and the question's not answered yet, because in the past, if jobs in industry and technology failed, then people could always go back to the land, but the land is now covered in factory farms, cranking out factory-food for people who can afford it, like Chinese.

It's common to think that Stalinist or Maoist societies were great colectivizations that have been "liberated" by entrepreneurialism, but actually, both Stalinist and Maoist societies were already working with underground economies exceeding 60% of GDP, all based on covert entrepreneuralism, such that the currently visible openings of entrepreneuralism reported by western media about Russia and China are just cases of their governments addapting to what the people were doing anyway.

By making it publicly acceptable, their governments could tax it better, and with that, control the infrastructure better, such that the boosts of overal GDP by both Russia and China are just a consequence of their respective government now being better able to manage and maintain the infrastructure required to support what was happening anyway.

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