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The United States of Entrepreneurs创业家合众国 Mar 12th 2009From The Economist print edition America still leads the world美国仍然引领世界FOR all its current economic woes, America remains a beacon of entrepreneurialism. Between 1996 and 2004 it created an average of 550,000 small businesses every month. Many of those small businesses rapidly grow big. The world’s largest company, Wal-Mart, was founded in 1962 and did not go public until a decade later; multi-million dollar companies such as Google and Facebook barely existed a decade ago. 尽管有目前的经济危机，美国依旧是创业精神的领航者。1996至2004年间，该国月均有55万个小公司成立，其中很多成长迅速。当世最大的公司—沃尔玛成立于1962年，自成立后近十年才上市。而诸如谷歌和FACEBOOK这种资产数百万美元的公司十年前才刚见雏形。 America was the first country, in the late 1970s, to ditch managerial capitalism for the entrepreneurial variety. After the second world war J.K. Galbraith was still convinced that the modern corporation had replaced “the entrepreneur as the directing force of the enterprise with management”. Big business and big labour worked with big government to deliver predictable economic growth. But as that growth turned into stagflation, an army of innovators, particularly in the computer and finance industries, exposed the shortcomings of the old industrial corporation and launched a wave of entrepreneurship. 70年代后期，美国是抛弃管理资本主义而采用创业多样化的第一个国家。第二次世界大战后，J.K. Galbraith仍然坚信现代企业已经取代了“企业家作为企业管理的控制力”。大公司和大量劳动力与大政府配合产生了可预见的经济增长。但当这种增长变成了滞涨时，改革群体，特别是计算机和金融业的革新者们揭示了那些老旧工业企业的缺陷并掀起了创业的新浪潮。 America has found the transition to a more entrepreneurial economy easier than its competitors because entrepreneurialism is so deeply rooted in its history. It was founded and then settled by innovators and risk-takers who were willing to sacrifice old certainties for new opportunities. American schoolchildren are raised on stories about inventors such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. Entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford are celebrated in monuments all over the place. One of the country’s most popular television programmes, c