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6 - Dealing with Irreducible Risk
Summary
This chapter describes the specific entrepreneurial archetype that appeared at the margins of the neoclassical line of inquiry during the 1920s and 1930s. Del Vecchio did not deal much with this topic, but, almost paradoxically, the two short articles that he wrote during the 1910s and published in 1928 in a German collected work edited by Hans Mayer, Frank A. Fetter, and Richard Reisch brought him international acknowledgment from Frank Knight as a forerunner of radical uncertainty analysis. As seen in the previous chapters, uncertainty permeates Del Vecchio's monetary analysis in its entirety, but he never stated it so clearly as when he treated the risk experienced by entrepreneurs.
When Del Vecchio examined saving and accumulation, it was already clear, even if not yet definitively so, that his economics was a theory grounded on the role played by profits. It is these that drive the system, albeit at the cost of constant instability.
But in the Italian academic environment of the time, Del Vecchio was not the only scholar to investigate entrepreneurial choices. On the contrary, many contemporaneous economists wrote on the topic and created a sort of Italian view on the entrepreneurial role. For this reason, the following treatment begins with the Italian theoretical environment, the description of which should clarify the original aspects of Del Vecchio's theory or, better, the radical tone of his interpretation.
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- Money as Organization, Gustavo Del Vecchio's Theory , pp. 135 - 152Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014