Late in the 19th century, Zionism was born, founded by a group of secular, yes let me repeat that, secular Jews. Its sole purpose was the establishment of a self-determinate Jewish homeland, and its eyes were focused solely on the lands of Palestine. To attract as much attention, passion and loyalty by Jews across all traditions, Zionist ideology was strategically founded on the belief and narrative that the Palestinian territories of the times were indeed the land that God had promised to the patriarch Abraham many millennia ago, and the only destination for the Jewish nation. They were the chosen people, and this was their promised land, and this goal was to be achieved no matter the means to such an end. To understand better the promise God made to Abraham, let's take a quick dive into the Torah to recollect the several verses of its first book, Genesis. The Lord had said to Abraham, Leave your country, your people, and your father's household, and go to the land I will show you. The Lord appeared to Abraham and said, To your seed I will give this land. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River the Euphrates. The Kingdom of Israel, when Jews ruled the lands, came and went, as did many other subsequent kingdoms and empires who presided over the same land, but let's be clear about something. Prior to Zionism, there was no movement by any Jewish people along history that called for the return of the Jews to their so-called homeland, neither for the return of a theoretical diaspora nor for the creation of a Jewish nation. Jews were assimilated everywhere, part and part of every civilization. Their identity was reflective of their socio-geographic situation. Jews in Arabia were Arab Jews, Jews in Europe were European Jews, and so on. With Zionism thought though, this reality had to be reinvented. Jews were told that they now needed a Jewish land, and to trigger the emotion of all Jewish people, the Zionists resurrected and preached the narrative of their only acceptable solution, the promised land. And what's the narrative exactly? Well, it's fairly simple. God promised the land of Canaan to the Jews, as written in the Torah, right? Well, that is it, but it's not quite as strong an argument as it sounds. The question that presents itself, is it the Jewish faith that bestows these lands on the Jews? No-one in Scripture does it necessarily say so. It actually says the seed, the descendants of Abraham, and makes no mention of any faith. You'd say that this fact is quite obvious as it's embedded within the Torah, the Jewish holy book, where God's promise was found, right? Well, not quite so yet again. Let me shed a little light on this. So if it's all about the holy book, then Christians believe in the Torah, the Old Testament, and find it as important to their own book, the Bible, the New Testament. Muslims also find the Torah, the Torah, and Arabic, as well as the Bible, the Injeel, as holy as they do the Koran. As a retort, one would then counter-argue with me by saying that it was the Jewish God who bestowed these lands. And again, I would reply that the Christians and Muslims believe in that same God. So if all these subsequent faiths believe in the same book and the same God, then why should they be excluded from their rights to the same lands that the Jews consider as their sole legacy? Why can't Christians and Muslims lay the same claim to these lands? But let's put this weaker point of contention aside for now. Let's get into the real reason why Jews believe that they are the only people deserving of these lands. The Torah explicitly lays out that the bequithal of lands to Abraham is indeed a genetic promise, originally to his seed, plural, but further on in the book of Genesis solely to his son Isaac and then further on to his son Jacob. There above it stood the Lord, and he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, and the God of Isaac.  So if genetics drive the strongest Zionist argument for the claim to the lands of Canaan, then this is the opportune time to disintegrate this element of that narrative. History never sits still, as doesn't any population, and definitely neither do commitments to any one belief system or another. Judaism didn't sit still. It was overcome to a certain extent by polytheism, centuries later by Christianity, paganism, and even beyond that by Islam. So to say that the descendants of Isaac and further on Jacob stayed Jewish for almost 3,000 years is naive. Most today might be Christian, Muslim, or even agnostic. Are these descendants not deserving of any claim to the lands of Canaan? Zionists have attempted to claim that genetic testing has proven that the majority of modern Jews in Israel are direct descendants of Jacob. Even if such a genetic link is infinitesimally minute, the percentage of DNA ancestry reaches high single digits at its very best. These tests have been published at the highest of academic and media institutions to prove to the world the Zionist claim. Whereas when we look at erodes, the Christians and Muslims who have been living in the region for many centuries have shown DNA ancestry levels well above 50% as a minimum. This further proves the notion that those who might have been Jews in ancient times became another religious denomination and remains till modern times. Such studies, although as important to those of the Zionists, are not aggressively pushed for public consumption, as it's quite obvious to the Arab world that those who resided in Palestine at the end of the 19th century had been there since God knows when. So from a genetics point of view, the Zionist claim fails yet again. The facts cannot justify any reason for the Jews to be prioritized as beneficiaries of such a godly promise. If you know, you know, and if you don't, then join the Chronicles, where we present content about Middle Eastern history, culture, and heritage. If what I have presented so far hasn't convinced you, then I ask, what of the many Jews who have zero genetic claim to Jewish ancestry? God didn't include them in his promise? Are they not the chosen people and the land of Canaan, not their rightful inheritance? This is both a rhetorical and serious question. So now I ask my Zionist counterparts, which is it, faith or genetics? Which gives the Jews the right to the Palestinian lands? From my perspective, it's neither. Late in the 19th century, there were pretty much no real nations, not in the modern sense of the word or system. There were still empires and territories, city-states, and rarely any true borders. What made nations back then were the people who continuously inhabited them. Even if the Arabs who inhabited them had all the rights and claims from both a religious and genetic perspective, it is their presence over the many centuries that lays their entitlement to the lands of Palestine. These Arabs who happen to be a majority of Muslims, a considerable contingent of Christians, and also a minority of Jews living side by side over the many ages.


DJI, mae hi i nifer eich synod. Fe pwrdd yna ddechrau. Rwy'n wedi wneud ar y cyflawn i'w cyflawni, eich hyn ar y bethau'r twistedr hyn o'r pindodi. Dwi'n ffordd ymlawn i'r ffordd i'r pindodi. Fyddwch yn ymlawn i'n golygu'r clywed. Mae'r su, mae'r athun. Rydyn ni'n ddod, As mentioned, my title is Ten Things All WordPress Developers Should Avoid. Now, I'm going to make this quite general and not too specific. Now, there's a couple of reasons. First of all, I wanted this to appeal to a wider audience as possible. Even if you're not a developer, you should generally understand most of what I talk about today. And also, I'm fully aware of the fact that my day job is not as a developer and there's probably some very professional developers out in this audience. So, if I get too specific, the Q&As at the end could get quite interesting. So, I'm going to avoid that from happening. And the other thing I want to say as well is, within the 30 minutes, I'm going to struggle to give answers to the 10 things I mentioned. So, in some cases, I'm not. However, if there's something really burning, there's the Q&As at the end and you can ask. So, four examples of what I wanted to show today. I created a blank test site and I installed what WordPress.org said were all the popular plugins. And a couple more that I knew had some interesting features. I installed and activated 33 plugins. I did it so you don't have to. It was a mess and we'll get to it. The other thing to say as well is that the 10 things I'm going to say today are in no particular order except for number one. Because when I put my name forward to speak here, I came up with a title like a lot of people do and a short description. But that's as far as I got. So, when I got the call to come and talk, I panicked a little bit. Oh, now I need some content. I asked chat GPT because that's the thing to do. I've ignored that. You would have got bored quite quickly with what it came up with. So, I turned to social media instead. And I asked, what's the things that plugin developers do that you wish they'd stop? And I got overwhelmed with one answer. So, in the end, I started asking people, what's the one thing that you wish they devoid that isn't this one thing? So, my number one, the first thing up here, is that thing that I told people to stop talking about. And as my only audience participation, I'm going to ask you, what do you think number one was? Any suggestions for the thing that annoys people the most that plugin developers keep doing? Hm? It was, it was. No, it wasn't that at all. It was, what I call aggressive promotion, or what everybody else said, banners. Admin notices. Now, it's quite interesting.  It was, what people were frustrated about was banners in general, not just, although most people said advertising banners. But the frustration seems to be the sheer number. Now, this bit that I call aggressive promotion is just the advertising banners. So, there's going to be quite a lot of overlap between my 10 things you'll find today. You know, there is an interesting Venn diagram hiding somewhere my 10 things of all these different things overlapping. But yes, the main one is banner ads. And here's an example from that site I set up. Once I'd activated all those plugins, I lost my dashboard. And there are lots of different types of banners up there you'll see. There is some that are promotional. A lot of them are just saying, oh, you need to go into your settings and do something before this plugin is going to work. Now, I have some sympathies for those, particularly if your support would otherwise get overwhelmed because you forgot to put an API key into a setting somewhere. But some of those don't fall into that category. They're very much kind of like, oh, just go into your settings please at some point. And also even the different types of banner ads we have here, there's even one there that's got a completely different width to all the others, which I'm not quite sure is about. Even how they get dismissed, some have got the X button, some have got links to be dismissed. And that yellow bar at the top, we will get to that. That's an interesting one in point entirely. And that will pop up again. So we've got all these different types, and this is the kind of thing that people were talking about. So, as I was writing this up, I was looking on Reddit, and lo and behold, somebody voiced the exact same frustrations with a very similar looking dashboard, and this is what we hear from users. Now, this next one I think is particularly good. The Roy Kent there is not part of the banner image that came up. I've just put that on because that's how I was feeling when this happened. I think it happened like a week after I had installed all these plugins. Three new banner ads suddenly popped up, and it's because I have three plugins by the same developer in. And so essentially the same pop-up appeared three times. And as you can see, it's very big, and the dismiss is only for 12 months. You don't get a full dismiss for this one at all. No, and I actually spoke to the WordPress core plugin team, not core, the WordPress plugin review team, to ask them, kind of like, is that right according to the guidelines, dismiss for 12 months? And it's kind of more, it's against the spirit of it rather than anything else. But there's also the other advertising we get as well. So this is a setting screen. And as I said before, a lot of the time, all you've got to do is just put an API key in for settings, and this is an example here. Go in, put an API key in, save. All of that text is advertising by a little bit of help on the right-hand side. Even the text under the save button is advertising. The help should really be in a little help tab in the top right-hand corner, as is the standard WordPress way of doing this. And the rest of it is just getting in the way of you, putting an API key and saving. And how many times are you going to do that in the life of a plugin? One admin is going to come in here once, put an API key in and save. How much is all that advertising, all that that's getting in the way of what you need to do? What's it achieving? So, now I say cheeky at that top bit. I've not looked into this, but I noticed that another plugin that also deals with Mailchimp is putting up a banner advertising their product. Now, I don't know whether they're spotting the fact that this is a Mailchimp plugin and injecting their own banner in or not. I've not got that far, but seems a little suspicious. Now, WordPress org's own guidelines say advertising within the WordPress dashboard should be avoided as it is generally ineffective. Now, the next three are under a section that I call Don't Make It All About You. Look at me, me, me, plugins that feel the need to stand out. And here... Oh, no. So, the first one is inconsistent and confusing menus. And here are a few examples. Now, this is from the test site I set up. So, let's start up in that top left hand corner. The mini-orange plugin. It's not going to have a graphic the same size as everybody else. It's going to have one twice the size of everybody else. And also as well, I put this one up, as it's a nice example of a menu which you question whether it should even be cluttering up your WP admin bar. Because all of the submenu options shouldn't... It's either selling, or in the case of plugin configuration, it should be under settings. Ideally, all of that should be under settings. OK, so you end up with a very cluttered menu bar through all of these plugins which feel the need to be on that menu bar simply so that they can call themselves out. Now, if we go to the bottom left hand corner, this plugin, I should say, I think has now changed this behaviour since I did these screenshots. But essential add-ons there. Purple background. Now, one of the things I did when I set up my test site was I changed the default colours of the dashboard. Which you can do. Not everybody realises you can do that. Obviously a lot of developers don't know you can do that. Because it breaks a lot of things when you do that. But at the same time, it's great for accessibility to be able to do that. And so essential add-ons, purple background. And if you look at the dashboard image in the middle, you can see that the little next to updates, the little notifications bubble should be beige in my colour scheme. So essential add-ons is decided to go for red. So they're even overriding that colour as well. And if you go to the right hand side, you can see the consequence of this. All in one WP migration. How many people can see their nice little graphic next to the menu? It's a bit difficult to make out. I think with the default colours, you can see it absolutely fine. But because I've changed my colours, you can't. And there's lots of examples there of people changing default colours, including their little graphical image as well. Now the middle one. I bought up. I'm going to have an interesting conversation with one of the sponsors later on, I suspect. Google, Google site kit. This is an example of plug-ins that fill the need to push themselves to the top of the admin bar. Because they're obviously more important than posts and pages are. Because when you go into WordPress, when you go into WordPress, you're not thinking about posts and pages, are you? No, you're thinking of going to Google site kit every time. And there's many other plug-ins that do the same thing as well. So those are just a few examples. And let's move on. Okay, so number three. Don't take over the user process. So again, another example screenshot. I went into that mini-orange plug-in.  I think you can actually just dismiss that and still get to the settings so I don't quite know what that's about. But it's that yellow bar again. Because they have decided to, instead of using the standard admin notices, they've decided to put their own JavaScript notification bar in. It conflicts with this little pop-up. And so now we have it in the exact middle of the screen overlaying everything else. The other advantage or disadvantage, as I like to call it, is that that wordfence, if you couldn't read who it was, it's wordfence, that wordfence bar also appears in the block editor as well. You can't get rid of it. It's everywhere. Which might be why they did it that way. Now, right, and here's another example of what I mean by this as well. There was a couple of examples of plug-ins that did this. And that is, once activated, a little pop-up appeared in the plug-ins list. And you can't access the plug-ins list until you action their little pop-up. OK. Why? Why do they feel the need to stop me from accessing my plug-in information for this? I'll say there was two examples of this, just in the most popular plug-ins that I installed. But there's also plug-ins I found as well that when you activate them, they take you straight into their setting screen. So if you've just activated a number of plug-ins, you don't want to have anything to do with those other plug-ins. No, I'm going to guide you straight into my setting screens because that's the most important thing right now. Number four, avoid creating your own UI. I'm not going to go into too much detail, and I think we kind of know what I mean by this, but I was talking to somebody about this yesterday, actually, and I think there may not be a general consensus on this one. But, yeah, when you come into new users or just non-experienced users coming in and using WordPress, going into a menu or going into any kind of screen within WordPress and finding they have implemented how their menus and everything else works completely differently is not the greatest user experience. And when you have multiple plug-ins, and I say these were just all examples I took from those popular plug-ins that I installed, all different plug-ins using completely different methods and styling and all the rest of it, breaking you out of the standard WordPress look and feel to do things in completely different ways. Now, at one point as well, I decided to speak to the plug-in review team at WordPress.org to see what's the one thing they'd like to developers to avoid doing. And they said lack of data validation. In fact, Mika, for those who know Mika, she was pretty outspoken on this one. So I'm going to quote her directly. Sanitise early escape, do not make excuses about one and two or use a darn nonce. I might have reworded that last sentence. Number six, loading unnecessary content. This one came up quite a bit as well. Plug-ins that will load scripts that just aren't needed at that point. So if you've written a plug-in that forms some kind of action in a postal page and the postal page you're coming and you're viewing doesn't need that script, don't load it. And the other thing as well is loading scripts designed for the back end in the front end and vice versa. Number seven, leaving content behind. So this is... So when somebody uninstalls your plug-in, which I'm sure they won't do, but if they ever do, does it leave anything behind? So many plug-ins leave behind data within the options table or even entire tables themselves if your plug-in created one. WordPress offers an uninstall hook, which you can use. Or better still, if in your plug-in folder you can create a file called uninstall.php and just put a script in there which removes all the data. So this is just a show. I practice what I preach. This is one of my uninstalls from one of my plug-ins. I also do a talk about WordPress Transients. So if I didn't mention them at this point, I would be failing in my duties. They are really terrible at housekeeping themselves, Transients are. So if your plug-in uses Transients, clear them out, which is what some of this big uninstall of mine is having to do. The TLDR of all that is try not to leave a footprint behind. Number eight, forgetting accessibility standards. This is probably the biggest one for me that I need to do better as a plug-in developer myself. So keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility and just proper contrast. And of course, don't cull your menu options. Number nine, ignoring code quality checking PHPCS is your friend. This is a personal one to me, this one. I love PHPCS. There's lots of tools available for developers to check the quality of their code and to make sure that it follows standards and guidelines. PHPCS in particular is the one I use. And there are lots of rule sets that you plug into PHPCS and it runs through your code and there are some WordPress rule sets. The hardest bit I find of PHPCS is just installing it in the first place. If you've got over that hurdle, it's easy after that. You can integrate it directly into your code editor. But if you've got a piece of mine, every time I try and save one of my WordPress files, it will automatically scan through and tell me if I've got anything wrong or if I'm missing anything. The great thing about things like this is the fact that it actually covers off some of the things I've been talking about already. A lot of things like the accessibility and all the rest of it, it'll highlight issues. It'll highlight the security issues that Mika was talking about. And number 10 finally is a big question mark. And there's a reason for that. There was a lot left over and there wasn't a 10th thing that I was really passionate about. So, I had these left over. Flooding users with too many updates. Deactivation surveys, just don't. Overuse of important in CSS. Pushing forum support off of .org. Ignoring the WordPress APIs. Not providing hooks or filters in your code. Creating new database tables. Abandoning your plug-in or if you have to, how to do it properly. So, these were just a few of the things that could have been number 10. So, I had a great idea. We've got a Q&A. So, if anybody feels passionately about what they think number 10 should be, here's your opportunity. Q&A, please tell me what you think number 10 will be. Now, I've set up this URL for anyone and at the moment there's not much there. It's holding page right now. But I'm going to put up all the slides and things like that from here. But the other thing I'm going to do over the next few months is all the items that I've talked about today are going to be I'm going to write separate posts for them. And including those ones that could have made number 10. And in a lot more detail. And then I'm going to put them onto here as well. I don't want to know anything more. Also as well, if there's any of these things I've spoken about today that you'd like me to write about first, let me know in the comments on that page as well. And I'll be happy to. And that, I think, with 10 minutes to spare somehow, normally I ramble forever and ever. But somehow, with extra time to spare, I've got to the end of the presentation. So, thank you very much. And we'll have some Q&A. Sorry, it's my mic on. It is great. Thank you. That was a great speech. Thank you very much for that talk. I think I'm probably guilty of doing all of those 10 things probably only just yesterday. But that was great. So we've got some time for Q&A now. We've got 15 minutes. I'm going to kick off the first question if that's all right. So of those 10, which is your personal most important and you can't choose CSS important. Which one would you choose? Probably just based on the fact that I've had more dealings and it's a personal annoyance to me was probably the menus, which is probably why I took quite a bit of time early on that one. The menus bit annoys me so much. I'm actually at the moment writing a plugin that will actually just trawl through the admin menus and tidy them all up automatically and put things under settings and all the rest of it because it's just I can't see an easy solution to it but yeah, I think the menus and just trying to find things sometimes I don't know about anybody else just clicking on settings the number of times I clicked on settings to find the settings for something and I couldn't find it and it's like it must be somewhere else and it turns out it was there because it's not in an alphabetical list I just missed it and install a few plugins and that settings can get quite large so yeah much better method of viewing and tidy a menu system I think. I think is when you log into a site and then you have to scroll all the way down the screen on the left hand side and it just keeps on going. Yeah and I said as well that those plugins that are at the top and all the rest of it it's just that even just starting off where is it to begin with and then as I say plugins that don't put their settings under settings that decides there are plugins out there where there's no submenu options under the menu they put a menu option in there's no submenu options when you click on the menu it just takes you into settings and it's like why is that there why is that not under settings it's an entire menu option just for something that shouldn't be there alright thank you for that answer I'm guilty of making another settings menu that says site settings as well don't do that either that's very bad do we have any questions from the floor for David hang on oh we need a mic up there please we could have one hi hi hi thanks great talk so I have a question about the custom UIs for the admin and I agree these are awful and we know it but on the other hand WooCommerce, the new admin UI is also a custom UI and I agree it's done properly it's nice but on the other hand still if an automatic owned company is doing things like this how we can expect developers to stop doing so when I talked about plugins that put themselves at the top of the menus I know Jetpack is one of those so I'm not here to talk for automatic or WordPress more generally you know whatever the solution is these are annoyances for users and that's what I'm here to present and what the solution to that is and I understand why people use the custom UIs why people are doing a lot of these things all about trying to promote your plugin and we go back to that the option of the me me me there is a reason why they want you to look at them they want to promote their plugin but it's this balance I think between how much do you gain from that versus how much annoyance you're causing there are some plugins that are so popular that people install and despite all their grumbles and all the rest of it and you know and it's a difficult one I am not marketing I would love to know the numbers to know how some of these things particularly like the banner images how much that really does gain versus how much it turns away customers and noise customers and as well it might actually not stop a sale but how much is the frustration of a customer versus the loss of a customer what's that worth in comparison and I do wonder if because it's not a loss of a customer it's just a frustration whether that gets lost sometimes yeah if all plugins look like core WordPress when you installed them then most people probably wouldn't even realise there's some kind of premium product or whatever so the upselling method is the bit is a lot of the time and so it'll be just the same for like Woo and anyone else trying to do that promotional stuff UI bit yeah it's another way of allowing it to stand out in some way but yeah I think the banner ads at least doesn't confuse the customer whereas things like the UI can do because you know when you've got whole screens where things operate in a completely different way from everything else that is just going to cause confusion for people thanks for the question do we have any more questions from the floor anyone else want to put their hand up on over there please hello I've got a potential 10th one forgetting about internationalisation and the volunteers who help with translating so I know that there are quite a number of plugins that basically get translated for free by volunteers and as a plugin developer you can support them in that so for example premium plugin be nice to your translators indeed yes there's another option for number 10 do we have one more question down there I think yeah there please hi thanks for the great great talk I would like to add some more about internationalisation please there are so many languages in this room here assume the string can be double the length if you have a button with fixed size and the German or Russian translation is two times as long the button layout breaks so as a developer please don't use fixed width for things and assume every string can be double the size that is a very good point something I've not appreciated myself is that something you've come across in support issues at all I know as a developer I especially find that as you said with German strings they can tend to be very long and need hyphenation in a specific place no I've not come across I've appreciated that myself I will be bearing that one in mind for myself in future yes one more to add to the list any more questions from the floor over there please hi well less of a question but more of an addition to using more hooks for less actions please add proper documentation even though we can also scroll through the code it's more convenient to just read proper documentation on your website instead and update it yeah any more questions from the floor anyone with a question just see if we got any on social media all right well I think we'll call it a day there then oh we do have one more question I'm sorry great thank you we have a few more minutes so like most of us I'm also annoyed by most of the stuff but I kind of feel like this is not coming because people just want to annoy us there's probably a reason for it and I suspect that all of this annoying marketing advertising probably just works so I doubt that we'll get plugin developers to stop doing it as long as it pays unless there's an alternative in some way so yeah one thing I often think about all these upselling stuff is probably only relevant to the administrators of the site because a normal user is not in the position to buy the pro version and install it anyway so maybe something like a only showing that stuff to the people who actually can act on it or something like this so some compromise because just complaining probably won't help if it pays yeah I understand what you're saying there whether the fact that the people who probably can't afford the premium products are the ones you're left pushing it all to is whether that's therefore the best solution doesn't seem good compromise yeah and this is one of the reasons why I said that I didn't have the time for the answers because the question around the promotional side I think is probably long just to talk about that alone would probably be longer than this talk could be anyway it's a complicated question but what I think I'm asking more for today's people to think about it when they're doing these things you know as I said that setting screen where you're only going to use it once an admin is just going to use it once what was the point in all of that advertising all of that clutter on that screen for me it was pointless I don't think that served any purpose some of the banner advertising that one which decided duplicate itself three times what's the point there why did they not think only do that the once it's a duplicate of the same thing it's just about thinking about how much of an impact that's having on the user experience and just making it a bit better if there's one thing I can ask from all this today it's good we're not going to resolve all of this but we can make it a little bit better than it is right now and just give users particularly the less experienced users a slightly better experience than they get right now thanks for the question I seem to remember seeing something on track about a feature notification plug-in to clear up admin notifications I don't know if that's still happening and that may help with those sorts of banners but I think people are still going to push them I was on contribute today yes when I heard that was one of the tables I actually went to that table just because I was talking about notifications today so yes it is still active but anyone else who would like to get involved in the notifications feature the idea is it will hopefully go into call there's an API as well as an interface to display notifications and it works like you see notifications elsewhere that all of the banner ads and eventually things like email and such like might then get pushed to a little icon and a little sidebar notification system out of the way a lot more banners will still happen in certain cases because there's still going to be times when you do need to push something more urgent in front of the user but yeah it'll just help tidy everything up that we've got there now so I'm just loosely involved only found out about it yesterday so I'm not running it so but if anybody wants to get involved in the notifications feature please do right thanks any more questions from the floor we've got one more over there please we've just got a couple of minutes left thank you you mentioned custom admin UI and a lot of plugins are doing it can you give a couple of good examples where a plugin has a lot of settings that need to be used and understandable and convenient that is not using a custom admin UI like an example that plugins developers could follow or base their new developments on so an example of a plugin that for the settings doesn't use its own UI and you think it's a good example not off the top of my head because I did spend my time looking for bad examples for this so I wasn't actually looking for good examples but I think personally the way I was thinking admittedly all the plugins I've ever written have not been commercial ones so I'm coming from a different place for this but certainly whenever I'm writing something I mentioned in those things that could have been a number 10 to use the WordPress APIs and I think that's quite key using more of the WordPress APIs to make your screens just look like the core and this is what I try and do when I write plugins as much as possible I'm proud of my plugins and I want them to look like they came with WordPress I think that's a good thing to show off to people install this and it'll blend in the back of course for something commercial that isn't what you want into the background and become invisible but that for me I think is actually for those that want to a good example for me is that does it look like it came boxed with WordPress and isn't a plugin Great, thanks very much for the question I think we're going to wrap up Q&A there everyone here wins a prize and that prize is to go back and refactor all your code so congratulations David again would you give it up for David please thank you very much one sec


What I'll be speaking from today is just a manuscript that I've recently put together called Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth and I start out considering the question of what causes economic growth. At the risk of over simplification the answers that economists have given to this question can be divided into two broad camps one following the ideas of Adam Smith and the other following the ideas of David Ricardo. Smith's overriding goal was to try to understand the wealth creation process and the title of his treat as the wealth of nations illustrates that and the first lesson that we get in the wealth of nations is that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. As Adam Smith saw it as markets grew entrepreneurship would lead to innovation that would lead to an increasing division of labor and increased productivity. Ricardo in contrast viewed output as being a function of inputs. He viewed that the income of a nation was produced by the inputs of land labor and capital. He took a production function approach to the question of economic growth. Investment could produce more capital which in turn could increase economic growth but because of diminishing marginal factor productivity and the existence of fixed factors in particular land population growth would always dominate economic growth and population most of the population would remain at a subsistence level of income. The ideas of Ricardo and his friend in contemporary Malthus pushed this idea on economics and ended up giving economics the name the dismal science. It sounds none too good the way Ricardo was describing it but this contrast sharply with Adam Smith's view of entrepreneurship and innovation that would lead to ever-increasing economic growth through an increased division of labor. Through hindsight we can see that Smith's vision of economic growth was more accurate than Ricardo's but as it happens the economics profession has followed Ricardo's views more closely than Smith's. I think a big part of that especially if we look at 20th century growth theory has been the comparative statics nature of economic models. Because of the comparative statics nature of economic modeling it's a lot easier to take the production function view of economic output and economic growth and it's a lot harder to model things within that framework to model innovation the increased division of labor and so forth. So as economics has become more and more scientific over the 20th century we've increasingly tried to model the economic problems that we've been looking at within this more mathematical more scientific approach and that's led us to focus more on the aspects of the economy that we're better able to parameterize that we can better fit into general equilibrium models and it's been a little bit more difficult to take that approach looking at the division of labor entrepreneurship and innovation and so forth because it doesn't really fit into that that production function approach and that general equilibrium approach so well. So you've probably heard the joke in fact Roger tells me everybody's heard the joke about the guy who's the night you know he's looking around on the sidewalk here somebody comes on you know can I help you what's going he says yeah I lost my ring and he said where'd you lose it and the guy says well over there across the street he says well why are you looking here so well the light's better over here and in a sense that's the way that economic modeling of economic growth has taken place that we've got models that are amenable to looking at problems in particular ways and so we're we're looking at the for the answers to those problems where the light is better rather than where it's actually more likely that we'll end up finding the answer. If we take that production function approach along Ricardian lines with output being a function of land labor and capital it really seems like the way to get economic growth is through investment and so a lot of the advice that economists have given over the last half century as to how to get economies to grow has been to invest. However the Smithian approach to economic growth focuses more on innovation than investment and in considering these problems it occurred to me that Israel Kersner's ideas of entrepreneurship fit in well with the Smithian idea of economic growth and the wealth of nations and that it might be possible to to incorporate Kersner's vision of entrepreneurship into more standard views of economic growth and perhaps get some better answers. In Kersner's view entrepreneurs act by seizing on previously unnoticed profit opportunities but these profit opportunities have to come from somewhere and as I'll discuss in more detail later on I think the most common source of profit opportunities is the prior activities of other entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship itself creates profit opportunities which then opens up the opportunity for further entrepreneurship. One distinction that I want to make this was a distinction I made a little bit earlier in some comments is the distinction between looking at the process of economic growth versus the environment that produces economic growth of the environment within which economic growth can occur and I think there's good reason for considering both but what I intend to look at more today is the process of economic growth rather than the environment within which economic growth occurs. In fact I guess there if we divide up an examination of economic growth that way we've got a pretty good balance here on the panel because I think the Betkin Olsen papers more were involved with the environment with in which economic growth can occur whereas Garrison's paper and my paper deal more with the process by which economic growth is produced. I think it's worthwhile to look at the environment and in fact there's been a lot of interest lately at looking at the environment. Jerry Scully has a couple of things he had an article in the JPE a few years ago and has recently come out with a book essentially advocating market institutions and suggesting that economic freedom leads to additional economic growth. Barrow has done a little bit of work along those lines of course your work and I'll also advertise again the book that Pete Betkin mentioned by my colleague Jim Gortney along with Bob Lawson and Walter Block this year put out a book on measuring economic freedom and they have drawn out they've gone through a lot of care to draw up indexes of economic freedom and shown how a higher index of economic freedom leads to more economic growth and I might say one of the things that they did that I think has not been done in this literature so much in the past is they've got a pretty comprehensive index of economic freedom they look at a lot of of the components of economic freedom stable monetary policy freedom of exchange protection of property rights and other interesting variable that they include in economic freedoms that might be worth some discussion later on is the size of government they find that smaller smaller governments lead they call that more economic freedom and show that that's correlated with economic growth and the interesting thing about their work is that they really focus on economic variables there's been a lot of empirical work though barrels work that I've seen has drawn on this index that's been put out by gas deal Scully's work uses that same index and that index has a lot of of political type freedoms how democratic a country is you know if you have the right to vote and and so forth excuse me and Gortney and his colleagues explicitly leave out any of those political various variables to look specifically just at economic freedom so well I see some good reason for looking at the institutional characteristics that lead to economic growth nevertheless most of what I'm going to focus on is going to be with the process of economic growth contemporary growth theory perhaps starts with the solo model at least most economists who are familiar with growth theory will will be able to trace it back at least to the to the solo model where again using that Ricardian production function approach we find that growth is a function or output is a function of capital and labor and in some way time so we've got some solo residual presumably the time itself doesn't cause economic growth but there's something that's correlated with time that that leads to higher levels of output over time and there's there's been a lot of interesting results out of this literature the the idea of some golden rule of growth was popular at one time the idea of convergence where growth rates across countries ought to converge is an interesting idea and in fact has led to further developments in growth theory because as a matter of fact when we look at growth rates across countries we find out that they don't converge that some countries seem to have persistently low growth rates other countries seem to have persistently higher growth rates and so that's opened up the question of looking at why it is that convergence doesn't occur when we consider something like the solo model we look at the relationships among output capital and labor it's relatively easy to to model those things and despite some measurement difficulties it's relatively easy to measure capital and labor and output so we can estimate production functions and so forth and the effect of time in the solo models a little bit more problematic it's been associated with technological change we think that in some way or another probably technology advances over time and so that's how time ends up having its impact but nevertheless that's that's pretty nebulous and it's hard to measure and it's easier to measure capital and labor so as a result I guess that's where the light is better we focused in on on capital and labor as a result and you know lest we think that we've just done that for for simplicity because these things are easier to measure or that we're using it as some sort of a framework for economic growth or something like that these Ricardian type growth models have been taken pretty seriously by economists and policymakers and they've been considered to be pretty policy relevant so that in the decades after World War two when economists have offered policy advice as to what we can do to get less developed economies to grow looking at something along the lines of the solo model we've advised them to invest and you know if we can get more capital in the economy increase the capital labor ratio that would help other economies around the world have developed economies have developed through industrialization so that seemed like a good plan we have advised less developed economies to industrialize invest in in industries and try to bring them along to become competitive on the world market but the advice turned out not to be very good advice and despite the fact that following the investment advice of the World Bank and a bunch of consulting economists and so forth that that investment was the key a lot of money has gone into less developed economies and in many cases they've remained underdeveloped even though it would appear that investment would be the key in the solo model and so that that leads to looking in in other areas try to figure out well okay maybe if investment isn't the key maybe there's other things that we might be able to do and again looking at this the nebulous effect of time if we think the technology might have been the answer the technology is what advances over time then maybe what we can do is increase the level of technology available maybe increased research and development might make economies more productive over time or again looking within the Ricardian framework if in part you would expect R&D in developed countries to spill over to less developed countries maybe that's not the answer either and economists have recently noticed that somewhat neglected variable there if we think that output is a function of capital and labor and somehow output advances over time well we forgot to notice labor so maybe labor really is the key and not and not capital but it hasn't been so much labor like the number of bodies itself that economists have focused on recently but rather human capital and it may turn out that it's human capital that leads to economic growth and Lucas has been one of the pioneers here in his paper in 1988 talking about forces that lead to economic growth was one of the early mainstream economists to suggest that maybe labor is the key and specifically human capital and so if we invest in human capital and education that that's a good thing to do and I have to say I really like that argument myself because working in a state university you know I'm thinking yeah if we invest more in education that's probably going to spill over into the well-being of college faculty and so I don't know if it'll really help growth or not but but I'll push the argument just for my own my own self-interest in contrast this Ricardian view the the Smithian view of economic growth has focused less on the quantities of factors of production going into the production process and more on the process itself I mean even from the beginning of Smith's wealth of nations when he has that nice example of the pin factory and he talks about how much more productive people are due to the division of labor what he's really thinking of is not inputs into the production process we've got the same raw materials the same people making pins so Smith isn't talking about inputs into a production process he's talking about the process itself and how we might be able to alter and develop the production process in order to make us more productive with the same inputs and this idea has been noticed occasionally throughout the 20th century there's a nice paper by Alan Young in 1928 on increasing returns in economic progress and Young explicitly builds his ideas on Adam Smith and develops the idea that there may be increasing returns and it's increasing returns that leads to economic growth and economic progress that's a very Smithian way of looking at the idea of economic growth however increasing returns doesn't really work that well all the time in a general equilibrium model so at the same time if you've got these general equilibrium models of growth you're trying to build on the on the solo model which essentially is an equilibrium model increasing returns might not fit in so well and there is an article I remember reading in in graduate school which I was fascinated at about at the time by Nicholas Calder in 1972 called the irrelevance of equilibrium economics and Calder's article built upon Alan Young's article which in turn goes back to Adam Smith but Calder was arguing that in fact increasing returns really is the answer to economic growth but that doesn't really fit in too well with the general equilibrium framework that most economists are using so Calder's answer to this was just to throw out general equilibrium analysis all together actually some of these general equilibrium economists have gotten a little bit better at building in some of these ideas of increasing returns and it may well be it's problematic if you have increasing returns in particular industries because then you end up getting all kinds of corner solutions and indeterminacies and that sort of thing and and excuse me you know we we really like determinant interior solutions to our models right so about two weeks ago I got a little ill and I still have this residual cough so I break into a hacking cough in the middle of my talk it's but lately economists looking at the idea of economic growth have gotten more into the idea of increasing returns and especially it could be modeled pretty well if instead of having particular industries having increasing returns if the increasing returns are economy-wide even though they're decreasing returns in particular industries and that occurs by having spillovers so you might have some kind of technology spillovers or information spillovers or knowledge spillovers and Paul Romer has put together a few models that show how this can work so in each individual sector you have decreasing returns to scale and yet because of these spillovers across sectors of the economy you end up having increasing returns Romer also focuses on the role of human capital so human capital has become has really replaced physical capital as I think the the darling of mainstream growth theory these days anyway and Romer shows how additional research research and development activity can promote more economic growth because there might be increasing returns to R&D and it also could be that that these returns might be localized there might be more localized spillover so you can have geographic concentrations of areas where because of spillovers there ends up being higher growth rates other areas have lower growth rates so we can sort of massage the the Ricardian approach to economic growth in order to fit some of the facts like non-convergence and so contemporary models even though these models I think fit into what I would consider the Ricardian growth framework nevertheless fit the empirical facts a little bit better if we if we look at the facts of economic growth I think they have to weigh against the idea of inputs into the production process causing economic growth of course this occurred to Ricardo right away because of the problem of decreasing returns but over the history of the world there have been lots of economies that seem to have had the inputs in place that would have led to economic growth and yet where economic growth hasn't occurred I think earlier we had mentioned the idea of China that had a lot of physical capital a lot of human capital they were technologically advanced and yet the economy didn't take off and didn't grow the pyramid the pyramids in Egypt still remain as a monument to the physical capital that they have there but I'm not sure it was really directed into sectors that might have caused the most economic growth you know knowledge has been developing over this the the centuries you gotta be inspired by guys like Leonardo da Vinci yet for for all of his genius in the knowledge that he had it really didn't lead to economic growth which is a relatively recent phenomenon fact if you extrapolate backwards today real GNP is about 37 times as large as it was in 1874 it's about seven times larger than in 1919 is more than three times larger than in 1950 if we extrapolate backwards extrapolate this growth backwards we can see we don't have to go back very far a couple of centuries perhaps before we get to a point where we'll be at the subsistence level the economic growth that we have today could not have occurred over a very long period of time it's a relatively recent phenomenon and despite the fact that the inputs to the production process in a lot of cases were in place again China seems like a good example so it's probably not the inputs into the production process but rather changes in the process itself not it's the Smithian view of growth rather than the than the Ricardian view of growth that really explains why we have economic growth and the Austrian the Austrians seem to fit well into that Smithian tradition Bombavirk depicted a structure of production that was picked up by Hayek and later by Garrison and incorporated into into economic models where we look at the at the structure of production we look at at more roundabout production processes what we're really focusing in on there is the process by which economic output is produced as opposed to the inputs into the production process per se and this idea remains current in the Austrian theory in fact I think that Roger's presentation this morning is a good example about how we can get some pretty interesting results by looking at the process of production as opposed to focusing on the inputs into the production process if we consider the role of entrepreneurship and technological change in the in the neoclassical framework even if we consider more recent growth models like those of Lucas and those of Romer where there is some focus on the process and technological change and research and development are important still it seems to me that those models go back to the Ricardian framework in other words if we think the technological advance is good we can produce technology through R&D then what we do is we combine resources into the production process and we produce research and development in those models the same way we produce other output so we're really not focusing on the process of production at all but rather we're looking at inputs into the production process but instead of focusing so much on physical capital like we did in the 1950s and 60s now we're focusing on human capital or knowledge or research and development or something like that so what's the alternative well what alternative is Kersner's model of entrepreneurship Kersner views that entrepreneurs are people who are alert enough to spot previously unseen profit opportunities and then act on them so in Kersner's view the activity of entrepreneurship is noticing something that nobody's noticed before and I think Kersner's ideas build on on Hayek's ideas and especially in his 1945 article the use of knowledge in society where everybody has some specific knowledge of time and place knowledge is specific to their activities and what they're doing that other people don't have and if given the proper incentives people then can act on this this these the specific information of time and place that they have in order to be entrepreneurial how does it happen that people can spot entrepreneurial opportunities that nobody's seen before economic theory really biases us against thinking that this is possible because in the neoclassical competitive equilibrium all of the profit opportunities have been competed away in fact if we if we think about that joke Roger told me not to tell any jokes but if we think about the joke that forms the title of your your paper man sir about finding the the the big bills on the sidewalk is everybody know that joke if we think about that joke you know I mean the reason why it's funny to economists and I found in telling the joke it's not funny to anybody but it comes but but the reason why it's funny to economists is it shows you in a sense how ridiculous the equilibrium theory that we advocate is you know you know but but where do these profit opportunities come from and I don't think that Kersner really gives a very good answer to this question actually it's not that that interested in answering the question in his book competition entrepreneurship he really focuses on entrepreneurship as an equilibrating mechanism and shows how the activities of entrepreneurs can help bring an economy into equilibrium so he's not so much interested in where the profit opportunities come from or how they get noticed but the fact that entrepreneurial activity is an equilibrating function let me give you my answer to that question I think that most profit opportunities get noticed by entrepreneurs because they're new they spring up they're new something that that wasn't there before people tend to notice it and entrepreneurs tend to act on those profit opportunities and that's what initiates the the Kersnerian entrepreneurial process perhaps you have to have some special insight to really see what those profit opportunities are in hindsight they're perhaps easier to see than in foresight but nevertheless if we consider famous entrepreneurs and see the way that they've acted Andrew Carnegie who built his fortune in US Steel was quick to notice that the Bessemer process was a more productive way of producing steel and capitalized on that new process it's not like it was sitting around for centuries and all of a sudden Carnegie notices it it's a newly developed process that Carnegie is able to capitalize on Henry Ford who was entrepreneurial in developing the assembly line and producing automobiles through assembly lines could only do that when there was a mass market for automobiles in order for there to be a mass market for automobiles there had to be the service stations the roads others had to be other automobiles around so it wouldn't really have been feasible to have assembly line production of automobiles before the the environment was was the way it was in Ford's time so Henry Ford sensing a profit opportunity and acting on it this wasn't something that had gone unnoticed for centuries things had changed the environment had changed the profit opportunity was a relatively recent opportunity Bill Gates who became a multi-billionaire producing micro computer software was able to do that because micro computers suddenly became possible it's not like micro computers were sitting around for centuries with no decent operating system and all of a sudden it occurs to Gates I mean he was one of the first people there on the scene to see that that profit opportunity so it's not like there I mean it's not like these twenty dollar bills are lying around on the sidewalk for us to notice but as soon as they're dropped people pick them up pretty quickly the profit opportunities are noticed because they're new there's something that wasn't there before the people hadn't seen before because they weren't there before another good example is is Ray Cronk and McDonald's you know who had the good idea of hey we can make the food before the customers show up and then we can give it to him really quickly and the original McDonald's sold almost entirely to drive-in customers but there was a particular kind of market that had to exist at that time when America became more mobile more people are traveling by automobile they can stop in and pick up their their hamburgers and so forth the opportunity is right in fact it wasn't even Ray Cronk that that started McDonald's McDonald's was going concerned at the time and Ray Cronk was a guy who was selling like blenders milkshake makers and this McDonald's restaurant ordered a whole bunch of these things and Ray Cronk is curious he just you know he's gonna fill this order but he thought I'm gonna go out and look at this restaurant because I want to see what kind of a restaurant is ordering so many of these things and so he looked at the restaurant and actually saw an opportunity that perhaps the McDonald's who started the restaurant didn't see it was bought up the chain and and was very entrepreneurial about it but that's an opportunity that that was a relatively recent opportunity it's not that opportunity wasn't sitting around for centuries or even decades the the market environment had changed and really as soon as that opportunity was available for the picking Ray Cronk took advantage of it a lot of these entrepreneurial activities excuse me entrepreneurial activities arise because of the activities of other entrepreneurs we see that that Bill Gates made pretty good fortune in producing micro computer software but that's only because some entrepreneurs had a good idea to produce micro computers and you remember the the story of Apple computer and these you know Steve Jobs trying to sell this idea of computers to established companies and they thought well this ridiculous nobody's gonna want little computers like this so they started up Apple computer by themselves an entrepreneurial insight again and if they hadn't been entrepreneurial Gates wouldn't have had his opportunity but we can take that a step further back you couldn't have made these personal computers without micro processors the microprocessor wasn't very old before companies started making micro computers so one entrepreneurial insight one innovation leads to another one bit of entrepreneurial activity creates more entrepreneurial act opportunities for other people so where do these entrepreneurial activity opportunities come from they come from the activities of other entrepreneurs one of the big ideas these days in standard growth models is increasing returns economists are trying to build in increasing returns through things like knowledge externalities that's a big idea where people develop knowledge and then there's not there are knowledge spillovers into other industries and these knowledge externalities end up creating increasing returns for the economy as a whole so it's not individual firms or individual it's not individual firms that have increasing returns but rather the economy as a whole and that's a very Smithian kind of idea you know Smith argued that the division of labor was limited by the extent of the market so as we have additional firms we have economic growth that leads the market to grow which leads us to have the opportunity to have increased specialization which opens up additional entrepreneurial activities that idea is is pretty clear in the for example Romer's models of economic growth but but the the idea of knowledge externalities is there without it without really discussing the process by which by which these knowledge externalities get produced and so it's it's worth asking the question what conditions have to exist in order for these knowledge externalities to be to be produced and we've discussed the role of market institutions in creating a fertile environment for knowledge externalities so if we ask ourselves the question what's the process that generates these positive externalities that lead to economic growth I think the Kersnerian theory of entrepreneurship fits in pretty well and we can point to Kersnerian entrepreneurship as the process that leads to these knowledge externalities that produces economic growth if essentially when you when economic growth is viewed this way it becomes endogenous because entrepreneurial activity creates economic growth which generates additional entrepreneurial opportunities which leads to more economic opportunity entrepreneurial activities which creates more economic growth if you have a very static economy if you have something like a traditional economy I think one reason why the the Chinese economy was stagnant didn't exhibit economic growth as it was organized along more traditional lines and was in fact a relatively static economy and when things don't change very much from year to year from generation to generation obviously there's not going to be very much in the way of economic opportunities or entrepreneurial opportunities it's the same thing as if we look at the economy in a general equilibrium model in a general equilibrium model there aren't any entrepreneurial activities because all of the profit opportunities have already been competed away so there's really no room for Kersnerian entrepreneurship in a general equilibrium now if the general equilibrium is disturbed for some reason or another then profit opportunities arise then entrepreneurial activity can can start up looked at in this way you see the engine of economic growth the engine of innovation in an economy is entrepreneurship and that's different from the more standard neoclassical models that point to things like investment in human capital and research and development it's it's interesting you know when you you consider I mean I think well isn't that really the same thing though that that entrepreneurship leads to innovation and which creates the incentive to gain additional knowledge and so forth but if you consider it within the Ricardian framework of production function approach and you think that the answer really is research and development technological change human capital this isn't something that we just figured out today in fact it was well known in centrally planned economies decades ago and isn't that exactly the strategy that the Soviet Union tried to follow and they were pretty heavy into research and development they invested in human capital they invested in physical capital and yet they didn't have economic growth and the reason why I would assert is there there weren't any entrepreneurial act opportunity see so so what I'm trying to do here is to draw a contrast between the Kersnerian view of entrepreneurship and them and the more Ricardian view of research and development is something that can be produced you know you have inputs into a production function where you can produce research and development and end up getting additional economic activity if we take the Kersnerian framework and look at economic growth in the Kersnerian framework research and development isn't the cause of economic growth it's the effect the reason why people engage in research and development is because they see that their profit opportunities and so they engage in research and development to try to capitalize on those profit opportunities so research and development is the effect of economic growth the effect of entrepreneurial activities rather than the cause of economic growth and again to see the contrast consider an economy like the former Soviet Union where they they invested in research and development they invested in human and physical capital and yet they didn't have economic growth so where does this entrepreneurship come from it comes from past entrepreneurship as I've suggested before we don't have a static setting in the economy in this case we have a dynamic setting where every entrepreneurial opportunity opens up additional entrepreneurial activities for new entrepreneurs there are several different factors that might lead to economic growth once we take ourselves out of an equilibrium setting one one is that when an equilibrium is upset that creates profit opportunities because we're in a disequilibrium situation which can lead to additional entrepreneurial activity a second factor that can lead to entrepreneurship and economic growth is increases in income itself if income is growing then if we go back to Adam Smith's dictum that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market a growing income leads to a bigger market and as the extent of the market increases we can end up having a finer division of labor and and we can have increased income as a result a third factor and I think this is really the most important factor is that entrepreneurial insights create new markets and as a result provide new opportunities for entrepreneurship that go along with that innovation and and this is really the key to to economic growth if we if we take it from a Kersnerian foundation you know if we consider for example an innovation like if you all tried an infrared mouse for your computer and use an infrared you don't have to have the court you just use an infrared mouse and that's an entrepreneurial insight and again like the examples I gave before the only way that you could really have that insight of the infrared mouse is if you somebody came up with the idea of using a mouse to begin with with the personal computer and the only way somebody could have that insight is if somebody had developed the personal computer to begin with again these entrepreneurial opportunities aren't just laying around waiting for people to discover them in fact pretty rapidly after the opportunities arise entrepreneurs spot them and they act on them and if we consider this example of the infrared mouse as a as an innovation and think about where it came from and consider the three factors that I'd concerned considered before it wasn't that entrepreneurship occurred because there was a disequilibrium situation it's not that the market was disequilibrated that created the opportunity for the infrared mouse it's that the new good the personal computer was available so disequilibrium isn't the explanation also rising incomes that's not the explanation rising incomes which increases the extent of the market in fact it's Kersnerian entrepreneurship the fact that somebody had the idea to begin with that you could work your computer with a mouse that's a better way to do it it's this Kersnerian insight this innovation that leads to the opportunity for the next innovation so we end up having entrepreneurial activity that's the result of past entrepreneurial activity if we consider using Kersner's model of entrepreneurship as a foundation for economic growth I think there are a couple of advantages to this first of all I think it adds some insight into Kersner's model of entrepreneurship and second of all I think it helps us to understand the process of economic growth a little better in Kersner's model of entrepreneurship he talks about these profit opportunities he's previously on notice profit opportunities but he doesn't really discuss where they come from and again I think that's because he's more interested in the equilibrating effects of entrepreneurial activity and so his idea is here's a profit opportunity that exists let's see how entrepreneurship leads toward market equilibrium but if we consider Kersnerian entrepreneurship within the context of economic growth then we endogenize the origin of these profit opportunities you know where do these profit opportunities come from to begin with well they come from the past entrepreneurial activities of other individuals you can see at the same time that we get some insight into into where the entrepreneurial activities might arise we see that for example if we have relatively stagnant economies we have economies that that aren't growing aren't developing there's not going to be very many entrepreneurial opportunities so we're not going to have very much Kersnerian entrepreneurship on the other hand in growing economies here's where the increasing returns comes to comes to play when you have growing economies more entrepreneurial act opportunities are created which leads to more entrepreneurship which leads to more economic growth so instead of just taking these entrepreneurial opportunities as as given or just available to entrepreneurs now by putting this in a growth framework we can see where the entrepreneurial insights actually come from they come from past entrepreneurship at the same time the putting Kersnerian entrepreneurship in is the engine of economic growth helps to give us some insight into growth theory because it it shows us how innovation takes place in the economy it focuses more on the Smithian idea of economic growth it focuses in on the idea that it's not more or better inputs that lead to economic growth but rather it's a better environment for entrepreneurs and this really leads back to the ideas of considering the environment of economic growth we think about market institutions stable money protection of property rights and so forth and all of those are our environmental factors that lead toward returns to entrepreneurs and so as a result if we have a setting that's conducive to entrepreneurship we're likely to get more economic growth and again this this contrasts with the neoclassical idea that I think has has kept up through the Lucas models and the Romer models and so forth of economic growth where it's the inputs into the production process now human capital and R&D are fashionable rather than physical capital but nevertheless we really don't see the process by which human capital or additional research and development lead to economic growth and the problem with that is that from a policy standpoint we run into the same problems that we ran into back when we thought that physical capital was the answer so that now the advice that we're that we're giving countries instead of invest in these infant industries and try to get them to grow so that you end up getting inefficient industries and developing economies that continue to drag the economy down because they continually have to subsidize the economy now instead we say well invest in human capital that's the answer you know if you invest in human capital but one ends up happening a lot of times you invest the economies invest in human capital but there's no real good way to apply human capital there's no entrepreneurial opportunities and a lot of times the human capital that less developed economies invest in goes overseas to economies where there are more entrepreneurial act opportunities so by using Kersner's entrepreneurship as a foundation for growth theory we see that it's not the inputs into the production process that are the key it's the process itself and its innovation and entrepreneurship that leads to economic growth so we need to create an environment that's conducive to economic growth and then we see that investment in physical capital research and development activities investment in human capital those are the results of economic growth we don't need to tell people to invest in research and development or human capital if entrepreneurial activities opportunities are there and it's profitable to do so then there's the market incentive for that type of investment to take place so that's really not good policy advice to begin with the policy advice is create institutions that are amenable to entrepreneurship and economic growth and at the same time you know if we take the Ricardian models of economic growth it still leads to bad policy advice as far as advising the investment in human capital physical capital research and development and so forth focusing on the inputs into the production process rather than the development of the process itself since the days of Ricardo when we focused on the inputs in the production process first of all we get pretty pessimistic results we end up producing the dismal science that shows us how we can never have economic advancement yet for two centuries since Adam Smith's insights we have and the reason why is as Smith told us the important thing is the process itself the institutional environment that creates an environment that that is conducive to economic growth it's the process not the inputs into the process