Sean O'Sullivan: Why do we lionise entrepreneurs?

The true entrepreneurs today are are the accountants, middle managers, executives and politicians who are involved in transferring wealth from the general public to private wealth hoarders

Look at the form of our economic system: inequality is rising, likewise the cost to live, protest is discouraged and schoolgirls are bombed while profits soar and profiteers are applauded for the obscene and seemingly infinite amounts of money they can extract. 

I hate being called an entrepreneur.

Over the years of running a busyness, sorry business, I’ve frequently heard this word associated with my work but have come to think of it as a very dirty word, its use an accusation of grift.

The word “entre” means between and “preneur” comes the verb ‘prendre’ meaning to take. I’ve come to see this word as meaning between-taker. 

Though I wish the between-taking was happening in a Robin Hood sort of way, I think there’s plenty of evidence to say our common understanding of the entrepreneurial spirit means the opposite.

A producer can be seen as acting between the raw materials and the customer, but that can also be an exchange, not always just ‘to take’. 

Officially, the word entrepreneur is defined as an undertaker, someone who undertakes some risk and completes a task. 

Just like the undertakers in our towns are responsible for taking our loved ones on their journey between life and death, this word started to enter into the dictionary in an economic sense in relation to those who undertook the task of transferring commodities between worlds, taking from the new worlds (better known as the colonies) and the old world, taking or extracting wealth between places they disadvantaged in the name of making profits for those that funded the journey — the already wealthy, the shareholders. 

Perhaps we use the French word to hide the less gracious but more accurate term of middleman.

Slaves traders can be considered entrepreneurs in two senses of the word: they took and moved human cargo between two places while simultaneously transferring wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest. 

The history of economics is grossly extractive, the hangover of this is also present when we look closely at the words we use.

Listening to the superb Sinéad O’Sullivan speaking on the David McWilliams podcast recently, the concept of the entrepreneur came to mind. Sinéad’s blog But This Time It’s Different is excellent, and she has gained a lot of attention recently from her Substack posts in which she defines the failure-premium present in our national economy, how in Ireland we are a rich company acting like a poor one.

Discussing landlords, nursing agencies and health insurance, she outlines how Irish policies of subsidies rather than organisation (competition rather than cooperation) add to the cost-of-living crisis by facilitating wealth extraction out of the public purse and into private hands through failures to invest in public infrastructure. 

It struck me many would applaud the profit makers, the entrepreneurs and middlemen who are ‘in on the take’ and that what she was describing was that private wealth was coming between the public and the public purse, taking a cut to generate further wealth increases.

In my experience of running a business, I’ve been encouraged to look for investment in order to grow the business. This seems to be the holy grail of running a small enterprise: get shareholder capital, grow business and return profits to the shareholder. 

In essence, extract money however you can and funnel that money up to those who had enough already to tinker around in investments — be the person in between the many and the few, take from the many and give to the few. Be a between-taker.

When studying design in NCAD, there were four stages to the design process: research, concepts, development and finalisation. I love this process and have come to agree with the tutors that research is the most essential part of the process. 

Sitting in Trinity Business School many years later, I heard a different definition of the same process: empathy, research, define, concepts, development. I understand when running a system there is no finalisation, you just keep going back to the start.  I also like the addition of the word 'define' into the process, as I think this is a helpful step, but I struggled with the word 'empathy'.

Struggling with empathy might sound a bit heartless but let me explain the context. Empathy, in this case, was with the customer alone and seemed to be using an emotional term to mask the fact this was essentially an exercise in trying to discover what would make someone put their hand in their pockets. 

I questioned whether this empathy would be extended to the broader community and would include those affected by environmental problems, inequality etc, but this didn’t seem to be a consideration at all. 

After all, we were in business now, not just idealistic art students any more. This was my first day in Trinity as part of Design and Craft Council’s Accelerator Programme in which 10 entrepreneurs had been selected to compete for investment — it was a crash course in enterprise, paid for by the government, lessons in how get between. 

I learned a lot from this programme but I’ve come to reject its teaching and the basic idea that was being communicated — find a method, any method, that gives the wealthy a chance to turn your product into a form of extraction that benefits them, social empathy be damned.

Unfortunately, the majority of products come from this way of thinking. Big business works in this manner by default, marketing is its spirit of empathy. 

When a business’s purpose is to have “responsibility” to its shareholders, then the focus of the business is to generate profit, to skim the cream off the top. 

In that case, the purpose of each product sold by those businesses is exactly the same. This fact will be concealed from you as the packaging, marketing and pitch will be purposefully empathetic but only to conceal the basic fact that whatever you think the advantage you get from the purchase is at best a secondary consideration. The primary purpose of the transaction is generating wealth... but not for you.

Consider the topic on everyone’s minds at the moment — the price of oil. The costs rises for everyone, the profits returned increase exponentially. The increase in the cost for every single individual who drives a car or uses home heating oil rises as companies take advantage of political turmoil to demand a further premium on their product.

I don’t believe our economy and the products that serve as its lifeblood should work in this manner. I believe we can own the means of production ourselves by understanding the product and our relation to it so we can have agency over our relation to it. 

Much like the food system, those that grow, cook and are nourished by food they plant in their own gardens relieve themselves from the premiums otherwise taken by those who come between the farmers and the customer - the supermarkets.

Another principle in design is ‘form follows function’. Look at the form of our economic system: inequality is rising, likewise the cost to live, protest is discouraged and schoolgirls are bombed while profits soar and profiteers are applauded for the obscene and seemingly infinite amounts of money they can extract. 

If this is the form, then it must also be seen as the intended function of a system that we live in, I doubt it's by accident.

Consumption, purchasing, the general unavoidable participation in this system that we call economic life means being charged failure premiums at almost every turn. 

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When we purchase from companies that focus on shareholder value we further entrench ourselves in this system by handing our money, slowly. slowly, bit by bit, unseen, to the wealthy shareholders who are the primary beneficiaries from each purpose. Everything is functioning as it was intended.

The true entrepreneurs today are not those who are problem-solving, creating change or building livelihoods focused on getting quality products to people; they are the accountants, middle managers, executives and politicians who are involved in between, in the transfer of wealth from the general public to private wealth hoarders, those who act as the bulwark in the middle and are handsomely paid to do so.

We don’t see this sort of work as anything quite as creative as something an "entrepreneur" might do, but look at what is being created — record homelessness, war and increasingly inequality.  I think we should all be asking what we are between, what we’re taking, from who and especially for who.

• Seán Ó Sullivan is an illustrator, designer and founder of Agus Arís (formerly badly made books) makers of recycled paper books