An altruism accepted by social commentators and politicians is that entrepreneurism is of critical importance to society. In the last two electoral campaigns in Sweden, politicians like Maud Olofsson, Mona Sahlin and Gudrun Schyman all claimed they were speaking for small business owners.

However, when I talk about entrepreneurship in Swedish, I usually choose to use the word företagande (‘undertaking’) rather than entreprenörskap: both because I find no reason to borrow a French word via English when there is already an excellent Swedish term, and because my grandfather thinks that I am talking about building contractors when I mention entrepreneurs in my research.

If one scrapes a little beneath the surface in the social debate, what appears to be general agreement about the importance of entrepreneurship is somewhat of an illusion: two years ago this spring, the Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies (ITPS) published a report that attrac...