Creating value vs. Capturing value
From a dialog with ChatGPT.
I think there is something quite coherent underneath our discomfort, and it is more interesting than simply “capitalism bad” or “business professors like money.”
What you are noticing is a mismatch between the moral logic of education and the moral logic of conventional entrepreneurship.
Universities routinely operate on a premise something like this:
If I make you more capable, knowledgeable, thoughtful, ethical, creative, and humane, I do not need to capture the return personally for my work to have been worthwhile.
That is an extraordinary proposition.
I teach you. You become better at solving problems. You go somewhere else and solve them. Perhaps I never meet the people you help. Perhaps my university never receives a cent. That diffusion is the point.
Knowledge creates positive externalities, and education traditionally celebrates those externalities.
Then, oddly, we walk across the hallway into the business school and often reverse the moral polarity:
“You have created something valuable. Quick! Protect it. Patent it. Establish ownership. Develop barriers to entry. Find a competitive advantage. Capture the value. Scale. Monetize.”
And suddenly the leakage of benefit that education celebrates becomes a failure of value capture.
That contradiction is real.
The distinction I think you've been reaching for: creating value vs. capturing value
A lot of business education quietly conflates two entirely different achievements:
Value creation: Something useful now exists.
Value capture: I have arranged institutions so that some portion of the usefulness flows back to me as money, ownership, power, or another scarce asset.
Those aren't the same thing.
Imagine one of your students discovers an extraordinarily cheap method of removing phosphorus from polluted water.
They publish everything openly. Within three years, 50,000 communities copy it. Lakes recover. Fisheries improve. Children have safer water. Nobody knows the student's name.
From the standpoint of human flourishing, this could be an astonishing success.
From one conventional entrepreneurship rubric:
Failure. No business model. No defensible IP. No revenue. No exit.
Now imagine another student patents essentially the same process, raises €15 million, restricts manufacture through licensing, reaches 300 communities, generates €8 million in annual revenue, and is acquired for €60 million.
Successful venture.
And that should bother us.
Because we have allowed the accounting system to define the ontology: what can be captured becomes what counts.
And this is where your “religion” analogy becomes surprisingly powerful
I wouldn't call business schools literally cults. But some forms of entrepreneurial ideology function remarkably like a secular theology.
They have articles of faith:
Growth is good.
Scale is success.
Innovation produces progress.
Competition produces efficiency.
Markets reveal value.
Entrepreneurs create prosperity.
Private ownership creates incentives.
Investment selects promising ideas.
They have sacred vocabulary:
disruption, innovation, scalability, market validation, competitive advantage, unicorn, exit.
They have conversion narratives:
“She was just a student with an idea. Then she founded a company…”
They have saints: Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Buffett, etc.
They have sacraments: incorporation, the pitch deck, funding rounds, patents, IPOs.
They even have an eschatology:
Scale.
The little startup becomes enormous, and somehow enormousness itself is treated as evidence that something socially desirable has occurred.
And here is the religious element you're reacting to most strongly:
The causal chain is often simply assumed.
Student starts business
→ business grows
→ student becomes wealthy
→ investors make money
→ jobs are created
→ economy grows
→ innovation spreads
→ society benefits.
There are about six enormous empirical and ethical questions hidden inside those arrows.
Yet people sometimes say the whole sequence with the confidence of someone reciting a creed.
That may be the “papal certainty” you're hearing.
Your question “Why are you so excited?” is especially interesting.
Suppose Professor A tells Student B:
Patent this! Start a company! This could be huge!
You are asking an almost embarrassingly simple question:
What exactly is Professor A's relationship to the outcome?
Usually Professor A isn't investing her retirement savings.
She isn't guaranteeing the student's debt.
She isn't promising to pay the student's rent if the venture fails.
She isn't accepting responsibility for the student's lost years.
And ordinarily she isn't entitled to the profits if it succeeds.
So why the extraordinary emotional investment in the student's becoming an entrepreneur?
There are several possible answers, and they aren't necessarily sinister.
The professor can receive symbolic and institutional returns: prestige, a great alumni story, evidence of “impact,” improved program reputation, perhaps stronger recruitment and donor enthusiasm. Universities love saying “our graduates founded 37 companies.”
There can also be a kind of vicarious entrepreneurialism. It is thrilling to imagine being adjacent to the next great success.
But notice the asymmetry.
The institution can acquire some of the reputational upside without bearing proportionate downside.
If Maria's startup becomes a €200-million company:
“IMC graduate Maria Schmidt founded…”
If Maria loses €80,000, spends four years working 70-hour weeks, damages her relationships and quietly takes an accounting job:
there is unlikely to be a university brochure saying:
“Our entrepreneurship program encouraged Maria to assume risks that turned out badly.”
😂
That's a serious asymmetry disguised by a funny example.
And then there is the strangest irony: the invisible hand.
You're absolutely right to bring up The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Adam Smith wasn't simply preaching:
Everyone maximize self-interest and—abracadabra!—the public good appears.
His moral philosophy is deeply concerned with sympathy, propriety, justice, our judgment of one another, and the social conditions within which economic behavior occurs.
Yet popular business discourse can reduce Smith to an extraordinarily convenient metaphysics:
You pursue your private benefit; don't worry too much about the collective outcome because the system transforms private striving into public benefit.
That really is a faith claim when invoked without specifying the institutional conditions under which it might hold.
Because sometimes private optimization produces public benefit.
And sometimes it produces:
pollution, monopoly, planned obsolescence, addictive products, regulatory capture, financial crises, depleted fisheries, exploited labor, enclosure of commons, information asymmetry and ecological destruction.
The invisible hand isn't the only hand in the room.
There are laws, norms, governments, families, commons, cooperatives, universities, public infrastructure, ecosystems, unpaid care, philanthropy, open-source communities—and occasionally very visible hands cleaning up the externalities afterward.
And I think you've found an even deeper contradiction around knowledge
Universities say:
Knowledge should spread.
Science says:
Publish enough information that someone else can reproduce your work.
Education says:
Take what I know and make it yours.
Open-source culture says:
Take this, improve it, and let others improve your improvement.
Then a particular entrepreneurial logic says:
Excellent discovery. Now how do we prevent other people from using it without paying us?
That's not a trivial contradiction.
The patent system has a sophisticated answer: temporary exclusivity supposedly incentivizes disclosure and investment, after which the invention enters the public domain. There are circumstances where that incentive may matter enormously—particularly where development requires huge risky expenditures.
But that is an institutional hypothesis, not a law of nature.
We are perfectly entitled to ask:
For this particular kind of knowledge, is restricting access actually the best mechanism for producing more human flourishing?
Sometimes the answer may be yes.
Sometimes emphatically no.
What is peculiar is teaching “protect your IP” as reflex rather than question.
Your “world where I can give everything away” doesn't actually eliminate economics
This part matters.
A commons-based world still has scarcity.
Someone has to make the solar panel. Someone has to repair the biodigester. Someone has to grow food while another person spends six months designing something useful. People need housing and medicine and childcare.
So “free” doesn't mean costless.
It means something much more radical:
Access does not necessarily have to be the mechanism through which contribution is compensated.
That opens an enormous intellectual territory.
Public funding. Commons. Cooperatives. Open source. Mutual aid. Universal basic services. Prizes. Patronage. Public research institutions. Community ownership. Cross-subsidization. Libraries. Wikipedia. Open educational resources. Creative Commons. Public infrastructure.
Civilization already contains countless things whose value vastly exceeds the revenue captured by their creators.
Language may be the greatest example.
Imagine if the descendants of the first people who developed grammatical German collected a royalty every time someone said Guten Morgen.
Absurd.
Yet language creates staggering economic value precisely because nobody owns it.
And that gives you a much more precise formulation of the world you're imagining.
You're not necessarily saying:
Nobody should ever be compensated.
You're asking:
Why have we built a civilization in which withholding access is such an important mechanism for obtaining compensation?
That is a vastly more interesting question.
And it avoids romanticizing a commons society. There would absolutely be difficult consequences. Free riders. Scarce resources. Coordination problems. Questions about unpleasant work. Investment. Accountability. Stewardship.
Your proposition is essentially:
Fine. Let's confront those problems.
Because our present system has problems too—and we have bizarrely naturalized them.
We treat the casualties of the existing arrangement as unfortunate facts of life while treating hypothetical casualties of alternatives as decisive objections.
That is an enormous epistemic double standard.
And this connects beautifully to something you said about education.
There are really two theories of positive externality competing here.
Education says:
Make good people more capable and release them into society. Their uncaptured benefits are our success.
Narrow entrepreneurialism says:
Make capable people able to capture more of the value they create. Their captured benefit is evidence of success, and we trust that enough of it will subsequently diffuse outward.
Your discomfort is partly that the second proposition is often asserted with less evidence and greater confidence than the first.
And that gives you, I think, a devastatingly simple question to ask your colleagues—not antagonistically, but genuinely:
“When we tell a student to turn an idea into a business, what social outcome are we actually trying to produce—and what evidence would distinguish success of the business from success of the idea?”
Then follow it with:
“If the idea achieved ten times as much social and ecological benefit by being given away, would we consider that a better outcome?”
If the answer is yes, you're no longer teaching entrepreneurship as the objective.
You're teaching human flourishing as the objective, with entrepreneurship merely one possible institutional mechanism.
And that changes everything.
The question stops being:
How can we turn this idea into a business?
It becomes:
What institutional arrangement will allow this idea to create the greatest durable benefit, distribute that benefit justly, compensate the people whose contributions make it possible, and protect the living systems upon which it depends?
Sometimes the answer might actually be:
Start a company.
But it could equally be:
Give it away. Form a cooperative. Put it in the commons. Create an open-source project. License it non-exclusively. Give it to municipalities. Create a public utility. Build a nonprofit. Let hundreds of small businesses copy it.
That, to me, is the intellectual move your colleagues' excitement is missing.
Business is a tool. It is not the purpose.
And once a tool becomes something whose goodness no longer needs to be demonstrated—when “start a business!” feels intrinsically exciting regardless of what that business does, who bears its risks, who captures its benefits, or what alternative arrangements might produce more flourishing—it has indeed stopped functioning purely as an analytical discipline.
It has begun functioning as an ideology with articles of faith.
And perhaps the question for your students shouldn't be “How do we bring this to market?” at all.
It should be:
“How do we bring this into the world?”
Then economics, finance, business, government, commons, open knowledge and entrepreneurship can finally take their proper places beneath that question rather than pretending to be the question itself.
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