andie_nachgeborenen
In sum, I think a combination of my explanation and CB's help account for the error in Hayek's statement that business experience (which he seems have quite lacked) is necessary or useful in economic theory. As CB says, business people generally have to focus on their private interests fairly intensely, leaving little time or energy for economic theory, this was apparently less true before the 20th century. Ricardo, Mill, Engels, among others who worked in both areas, we're able to be highly successful in both. As I said, business success requires a different skill set from academic theory. Some psychological research I could give you the sources for indicates that the most successful businesspeople are of just slightly more than average intelligence as measured by IQ, and that about 90% of the difference between more and less successful people in business today is due to "emotional intelligence,' people skills. you need them to prosper in the academy too, but they don't help you with insight into the economy
^^^^^ CB: A related reverse phenomenon might be low academic educational attainment by successful businessmen, such as Henry Ford and Peter Karmanos, a current big business figure in Detroit. Both did not go to college. There are others I can't think of right now. Carnegie's bootstrap legend is one , I believe. I suppose college is too likely to inflict one with some humanism, which removes the level of ruthlessness necessary to succeed at the top level. On the other hand, J.P. Morgan was some kind of math whiz in Germany, though Ford and Karmanos got to have pretty good arithmetic skills.
Then on the earlier discussion of Engels and Marx, I'm thinking business experience would help at the micro-economic or in Marx's term "cellular" level. So, Engels' individual enterprise experience might have helped Marx to develop cellular analysis. The following is where I get Marx's cell metaphor:
"Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised. [1] The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
Then maybe the historical development of the corporate form in capitalism moves the Type Capitalist further and further from direct supervision of production and toward finance ( as predicted in Marx and Engels analysis of the corporate form). This follows logically from capitalist enterprises as essentially surplus value makers and capital , which is money, accumulators. So, Engels, Mills and Ricardo's experience was closer to production than that of later capitalists.