What can economics actually teach you about running a business? From the mainstream, Per Bylund argues, very little—its models have no room for the entrepreneur at all. Austrian economics is a different matter. Working from Menger forward, Bylund lays out the sequence every business faces: costs come first and certain, value comes last and unknown. From that he draws the practical implications—why cost-plus pricing is a recipe for failure, why no producer has “pricing power” even as a monopolist, why the firm is best understood as a temporary island of specialization, and why the entrepreneur’s only real question is how best to serve the consumer.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

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