This conclusion introduces a stunning contrast to the economics practiced in North America today. While Anglo-American economists constructed theories around the allocation of scarce resources and the concept of equilibrium as a functioning end-state in the absence of any initiating actor in the process, the Austrians (and subsequently Europeans along with the Japanese) did not agree. Instead they took the approach that economics was best explained by entrepreneurs who, constantly alert to new opportunities, took actions and drove a market process that in effect had an optimum goal, equilibrium, but one that is never attained