Joseph Schumpeter
Creative destruction, entrepreneurship theory
Most quoted
"In capitalist reality as distinct from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives."
— from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942
"The function of the entrepreneur is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on."
— from The Theory of Economic Development, 1934
"The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."
— from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942
All quotes by Joseph Schumpeter (318)
Profit is the premium put upon successful innovation in capitalist society.
Credit is essentially the creation of purchasing power for the purpose of transferring it to the entrepreneur.
Without development there is no profit, without profit no development.
The history of the productive apparatus of the iron industry, from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, is a history of revolutions.
The business cycle is essentially the result of innovation.
The fundamental phenomenon of economic development is the spontaneous and discontinuous change in the channels of the economic flow.
The entrepreneur is the person who overcomes the resistance of the habitual routines of the economic world.
The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history.
The public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society, especially though not exclusively of its political life.
A science is never the work of one man, but of generations.
The first thing to realize about economic analysis is that it is not a set of political prescriptions.
Analytic effort is of necessity preceded by a preanalytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort.
Economics is a big omnibus which contains many passengers of incommensurable interests and abilities.
There is no such thing as a purely economic history.
To be a good economist, you must be more than an economist.
The bureaucratization of the world is the inevitable fate of our time.
The capitalist process, by substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls of and the machines in a factory, takes the life out of the idea of property. It loosens the grip that once was so strong—the grip in the sense of the legal right and the actual ability to do as one pleases with one’s own.
The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses.
Contemporaries of Joseph Schumpeter
Other Economicss born within 50 years of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950).