Joseph Alois Schumpeter Quotes

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factor Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment. I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people's lives. Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. The strategic stimulus to economic development in Schumpeter's analysis is innovation, defined as the commercial or industrial application of something new---a new product, process or method of production, a new market or source of supply, a new form of commercial, business or financial organization. Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention. Gentlemen, a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche. Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do-not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose. The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own. Profit is the payment you get when you take advantage of change. There exists no more democratic institution than the market The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again. At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction. Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort. Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going. The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a Faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is disapproved of not only intellectually but also morally. There cannot be any excuse for it once the Message has been revealed. Capitalism Survive?�'I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism. It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. 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. Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones The state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory that construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind. The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily - and perhaps most tellingly - described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit. Surely, nothing can be more plain or even more trite common sense than the proposition that innovation [...] is at the center of practically all the phenomena, difficulties, and problems of economic life in capitalist society. The perennial gale of creative destruction The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense.... Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it. The banker, therefore, is not so much primarily a middleman in the commodity 'purchasing power' as a producer of this commodity. However, since all reserve funds and savings today usually flow to him, and the total demand for free purchasing power, whether existing or to be created, concentrates on him, he has either replaced private capitalists or become their agent; he has himself become the capitalist par excellence. Access to the national dividend is usually to be had only on condition of some productive service previously rendered or of some product previously sold. This condition is, in this case, not yet fulfilled. It will be fulfilled only after the successful completion of the new combinations. Hence this credit will in the meantime affect the price level.