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Ghosh, Shubha --- "Introduction: Can We Incentivize Creativity and Entrepreneurship?" [2011] ELECD 425; in Ghosh, Shubha; Malloy, Paul Robin (eds), "Creativity, Law and Entrepreneurship" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Creativity, Law and Entrepreneurship

Editor(s): Ghosh, Shubha; Malloy, Paul Robin

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848449879

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Introduction: Can We Incentivize Creativity and Entrepreneurship?

Author(s): Ghosh, Shubha

Number of pages: 5

Extract:

1. Introduction: can we incentivize
creativity and entrepreneurship?
Shubha Ghosh

Legal rules and institutions are often understood in instrumental terms.
They are a means to certain socially desirable ends. For example, securities
laws are justified in terms of creating transparency and more information-
ally efficient markets. Health and safety regulations, whether in the form
of federal administrative rules or tort law, deter socially harmful conduct
and create more trustworthy and protected public spaces. And of course,
intellectual property laws are described as legal regulations that incentiv-
ize the publication or commercialization of creative works, whether those
that entertain us or those that increase the stock of scientific and technical
knowledge.
Society is considered as including other instruments in addition to law.
Business activities, social interactions, creative works, scientific break-
throughs ­ each understood as arising from individuals who are acting
instrumentally, pursuing certain actions to reach certain ends. Poetically,
the individual actor may be seen as an instrument of some hidden actor, a
muse, a god, a spiritual principal, each serving as a metaphor for an inef-
fable or unknowable internal force. But such poetry serves to dodge the
more challenging question of what drives people to achieve the various
accomplishments that law tries to encourage or to pursue the nefari-
ous ends that law prohibits. To replace the spiritual principal with self-
motivation or self-interest seems to answer the question only partially.
After all, what is the self that is so motivated to act in the pursuit of its ...