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Йозеф Шумпетер

After growing up in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which he worked as an itinerant lawyer, Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) became an academic in 1909. He was appointed Austrian minister of finance in 1919, presiding over a period of hyper-inflation. He then became president of a small Viennese bank, which collapsed. He returned to academia in Bonn in 1925 and in the 1930s joined the faculty of Harvard. In 1911, while teaching at Czernowitz (now in Ukraine), he wrote the Theory of Economic Development. In this he set out his theory of entrepreneurship, in which growth occurred, usually in spurts, because competition and declining profit inspired entrepreneurs to innovate. This developed into a theory of the trade cycle (see business cycle), and into a notion of dynamic competition characterized by his phrase “creative destruction”. In capitalism, he argued, there is a tendency for firms to acquire a degree of monopoly power. At this point, competition no longer takes place through the price mechanism but instead through innovation. Perhaps because monopolies often become lazy, successful innovation may come from new entrants to a market, who take it away from the incumbent, thus blowing “gales of creative destruction” through the economy. Eventually, the new entrants grow fat on their monopoly profits, until the next gale of creative destruction blows them away. Ever controversial, and often wrong, in his 1942 book, CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY, he predicted the downfall of capitalism at the hands of an intellectual elite. He is associated with both Austrian economics and, arguably as founding father, evolutionary economics.

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