Joseph Schumpeter

Who was Joseph Schumpeter?

Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian American economist and political scientist. He briefly served as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Schumpeter popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.

Famous Quotes:

• 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.
• 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.
• Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
• 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.
• Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.
• 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.
• The question that is so clearly in many potential parents minds: Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?
• Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
• We always plan too much and always think too little.