By creating a new product, finding a new market, or discovering a more efficient method of production, Schumpeter claims that an entrepreneur can, for a time, make exceptional profits. These excess profits, Schumpeter agrees with the neoclassicals, won’t last forever. As soon as others copy the entrepreneur’s techniques, supply will increase and so prices will decline until profits equal the wages of a hired worker doing the same job. Schumpeter’s florid prose does make entrepreneurs sound like Nietzschean supermen rather than our more commonplace vision of middle-aged men in suits talking enthusiastically into phones, worried about selling enough widgets every month to cover their nuts. Schumpeter would claim that our widget wholesaler is just a “businessman,” the “entrepreneur” a more distinguished subset of the group, the innovator with new techniques or new technologies that allow him to make supernormal profits. Of course, in common conversation, the businessman and the entrepreneur are synonyms: that is to say, the individual directs a business enterprise, and unlike employees does not earn a regular wage, and unlike lenders does not receive regular interest payments. The entrepreneur or businessman then is the person who collects the residual profits of the business after wages, interest, and other expenses are paid. - lareviewofbooks.org