Prophet of Innovation Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction - Hardcover

TK McCraw

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674025237 ISBN 13: 9780674025233

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Pan Am, Gimbel's, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland - all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. "Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism. Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most sophisticated conservative" of the 20th Century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril - to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind. During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the spectre of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983 - the centennial of the birth of both men - Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate. "Prophet of Innovation" is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman - and admitted to failure only with the horses.

About this title

Product Description:

The book is brand new and will be dispatched from UK.

Review:

McCraw's triumph is to tell less exacting readers quite as much as we need to know about Schumpeter in a lucid and well-paced narrative, while also supplying, for more rigorous scholars, no fewer that two hundred pages of endnotes. McCraw successfully passes off the life of a professor of economics as a story that fully complements its undoubted intellectual significance with a tantalising human interest. -- London Review of Books, 19 July 2007

This biography is the clearest and most comprehensive guide to Schumpeter's life and work and the turbulence of his time.
-- Spectator Business, 1 December 2008

[A] splendid, full-dress biography covering [Schumpeter's] ideas,
life and times [...] by Thomas McCraw, one of America's most respected
business historians. -- Economist, 28 April 2007

[McCraw] has found the perfect subject in Schumpeter. He succeeds
in getting inside the economist's head, explaining not just what he thought
but why he thought it. Beyond this, he also succeeds in painting a portrait
of his times. -- Economist, 28 April 2007

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0674025237
• ISBN 13: 9780674025233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 736