Books and other Resources about Joseph Schumpeter

>Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian-American Economist.  He is responsible for popularizing the phrase “Creative Destruction” to describe a capitalist economy.  His research and insights about business cycle theory, entrepreneurship, and political economy remain highly relevant to this day.  Schumpeter rightly observed that economic progress necessarily involves some companies and industries being displaced when new innovations render them uncompetitive.  He also observed and correctly predicted that these uncompetitive industrial elements would collaborate to lobby the government and attempt to protect their industry through legislative fiat.  He also predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably result in the election of political representatives who promise to raid the profits of entrepreneurs for the purpose of re-distribution to the populace.

Quotes Attributed to Joseph Schumpeter

Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political – legislative and administrative – decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

The ballot is stronger than bullets.

It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience.  Witness the most famous of all trials.  Pontius Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy.  Yet he tried to protect freedom … and he yielded to a democracy.