I have come to the conclusion after four or five decades in international development that the most important basis for development is a good set of institutions -- rule of law, fair markets, government that makes policies for the good of the people rather than the good of the power elite, etc. Businessmen I have known support these institutions. They know that their business won't survive without a well educated and healthy workforce.
I also know that it takes more than one generation to build the complete set of these institutions, what President Obama called in his talk, the American system that is responsible for the success of our businesses.
He of course also mentioned infrastructure. It is really hard to build a successful business these days if you can't rely on the electric power getting to your place of business. It is also very nice to have piped water and sewerage. If the runoff from rainfall isn't drained away and floods your offices and factory, production goes down. How do you plan to sell products if the roads, railroads, airports and ports are in bad shape and transportation costs increase the prices of your products. Indeed, how does an Indian entrepreneur sell Internet mediated services abroad without electricity, telecommunications and Internet providers.
I suspect that most successful businessmen had mothers and fathers that saw that they got a great start in life --- this is doubly true now that there is very little chance in the United States of someone from poor and uneducated parents rising to the class of successful businessmen. As President Obama said, most successful businessmen had good educations, paid for by others and provided by hard working teachers.
It takes money to start a business. Where did the successful entrepreneur get the funds needed. He may have inherited wealth, which implies help from family. He may have inherited family connections as some prominent politicians have done, and gotten financial help from those connections. He may have married money, getting financing from wife and/or her family. He may have tapped angel capital, investment capital, banks or eventually the stock market and bond market; in all cases, someone helped.
In my classes in business school I learned that while once managers treated employees as interchangeable parts, increasingly good management involves encouraging employees to contribute to the success of their companies and recognizing their contributions. I would not invest in a company in which the CEO or major stockholders did not recognize how much the success of the business was due to its staff, and indeed to consultants, suppliers and others who contribute to the bottom line.
Businesses are based on technology. Technology by its very nature is cumulative. Think about firms like Amazon and EBay, and the degree to which they depend on the Internet, computers, software, microelectronics, etc. All of those technologies were created by others and were available for those enterprises. (Incidentally, the key contributors to these technologies -- people who won Nobel Prizes and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation -- were successful by almost everyone's criteria, except that they seldom got rich. Money is not the only indicator of success, even in business.) Even more generally, we can trace the Internet back to discoveries of the nature of electro-magnetism, to the invention of the telephone, to the invention of the technology for electrical power generation and distribution, to the invention of electronic devices, etc. The modern businessman draws on centuries of technological invention and improvement, without which he would be as successful as a prehistoric member of a hunter-gatherer society.
It has been suggested that the payment due to all this help is the payment of one's fair share of taxes. I would maintain that that is certainly true. Perhaps the debt is also some humility, and some fellow feeling for the descendants of all those who have gone before, creating the conditions that allow us to succeed.
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