The most useful idea I've found so far for thinking about work and career comes from Dawkins. He points out that money is just an abstract mechanism for managing reciprocal altruism. As a knock on to that idea, we're programmed to crave those relationships and to build a deep and rich network of friends through them.
I think a huge part of our problem in the current historical moment is our lack of awareness of this fact, and it's a big part of why so many people are dissatisfied with their work and the state of social projects, including their view of the ways in which genius is employed.
To your point, I think the problem is not so much with entrepreneurship itself, but with the fact that it's filled in for all of the other decaying forms of altruism in modern society. The rewards for doing some deep scientific work (in the form of respect and prestige) have slowly decreased along with the rise of anti-intellectualism, while the rewards of entrepreneurship have skyrocketed (or at least appear to have from the vantage point of the average person). The new pop image of the "genius" is Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, not some guy plugging away at equations in Cambridge. Those people still exist, obviously, but the cultural respect and the other forms of value they're compensated with have decreased dramatically.
I think a huge part of our problem in the current historical moment is our lack of awareness of this fact, and it's a big part of why so many people are dissatisfied with their work and the state of social projects, including their view of the ways in which genius is employed.
To your point, I think the problem is not so much with entrepreneurship itself, but with the fact that it's filled in for all of the other decaying forms of altruism in modern society. The rewards for doing some deep scientific work (in the form of respect and prestige) have slowly decreased along with the rise of anti-intellectualism, while the rewards of entrepreneurship have skyrocketed (or at least appear to have from the vantage point of the average person). The new pop image of the "genius" is Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, not some guy plugging away at equations in Cambridge. Those people still exist, obviously, but the cultural respect and the other forms of value they're compensated with have decreased dramatically.