Book Description
Listen to a short interview with Thomas McCraw
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
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 twentieth 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 specter 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.
Customer Reviews:
A Great Work!.......2007-10-08
Schumpeter was an unusual man: both professionally and personally. This excellent biography captures both. Schumpeter sought fame, and the agonies he went through to achieve this obsession- mainly through the enormous amount of writing and research he undertook, which probably undermined his health and shortened his life- are well captured in this book.
Schumpeter sought to develop a 'system' of economics, yet his prolific reading and research lead him to discover that there is no such thing as a watertight system of economic theory. In fact, Schumpeter found, like most notable economists, that an understanding of economics comes from an understanding of history, psychology, sociology and many other areas of learning. And what a contrast to the emphasis of graduate economics courses taught in our schools today!
Having just read Greenspan's book, it comes as no surprise that Greenspan achnowleged Schumpeter as one of the greatest influences upon his outlook. Both men believe in the superiority of the capitalist system as a creator of wealth, yet not for any doctriare reasons, but because they are/were convinced that capitalism is part and parcel of the make up of humankind, and the way in which we organize themselves and cooperate to ensure our survival and progress.
Buy this book, and enjoy the read; you will find yourself coming back to it to reread sections over again.
Important.......2007-06-23
Free markets are hard to explain. It is even harder to explain why companies must fail and be replaced by new ones. In the U.S. we mostly let that happen but in Europe they try and prevent it. It seems that this issue will become even more important as the world becomes 100% "flat" and competition becomes more intense. Developments in Asia will make the levels of creative destruction we have seen in the past look mild by comparison.
This book gives a great introduction to one of the great economic minds. His insights, although proven over and over, are still not accepted my many.
Review of McCraw's book on Schumpeter.......2007-05-31
I have been impressed by this book, which is a good mix of the 'history' of Joseph Schumpeter and his ideas and contributions to economics. I think the author has obtained a very good balance between trying to understand this great economist, and presenting his work to the informed lay-person. Economists and non-economists alike will find a lot here, which is very relevant to today (perhaps even more so to economists working in academia!). Some of Schumpeter's major works (like Business Cycles published in 1939) are not easy to digest; but this book brings out enough to capture the essentials. Overall, this is the best book on Schumpeter I have seen.
BEST WRITTEN RECENT BIOGRAPHY; BUT TENOUS WHEN IT MOVES FROM HISTORY TO ECONOMICS.......2007-05-01
Thomas McCraw is one of the best business historians in the world and with this output, late in his career (he is an emeritus professor at Harvard now), he can lay claim to being one of the best historians in the world, not just a business historian. It is hard to imagine a political biography in recent years that comes close to matching the lucid style, perfect prose, excellent quotes and commentary about life as this book.
The subject is one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, someone who along with Frederick Hayek, Ludwig Mises and others from the Austrian School came to anchor the philosophical basis for the success of economic and political freedom. The book covers in detail the personal life of Schumpeter, including a lot of material not commonly available. His biography of the deaths of his daughter mother and wife within months is an excellent if tragic basis to delineate the first part of Schumpeter's life, which the author suggests made him an Enfant Terrible, from the second, which the author calls made him an adult. The final segment is his becoming a Sage. Peppered throughout the book are some of the best quotations from some of the most famous persons in history, including legendary poets, yet ones the reader would never have read before.
For all those reasons, Thomas McCraw has delivered a book that is filling like a all-you-can-eat buffet, yet with each dish of the same quality as fine dining. IT IS A TOUR DE FORCE.
Yet there is a contextual flaw which weighs down the narrative. From the very first pages it is clear that Thomas McCraw is attempting to also make a comparative evaluation of economic systems, a task that quickly appears tenous, and to do that while crowning Schumpeter as the king of economics, past and present, at which point the narrative makes one cringe. Here is why this brilliant history turns into tenous economic analysis.
Firstly, as Thomas McCraw's colleagues across the Charles River should tell him, Schumpeter was his best not so much as a pure AUstrian-School economist but as a chronicler of the economy, almost a contemporary historian of the subject. In that sense he shared much with Karl Marx, who he studied extensively, for both really shined with words not with mathematics. So the author's repeated references to Schumpeter as a mathematical genius, or as a competitor in that regard with John Keynes, fails and fails obviously. Schumpeter was the least mathematical of all the great economists of the twentieth century.
Secondly, McCraw makes the error common to passionate biographers to make a sage out of their subject. Here too the book overreaches, for Schumpeter was among the worst at foretelling the future. Here again it was because he was more a historian, and less an economist. He predicted capitalism would collapse, a prediction that the author just glosses over. Yet the author pillories Karl Marx for the same error without realizing that Karl Marx wrote without the full benefit of the technological revolution, the telegraph and railroad barely underway by the 1840s. Yet by Schumpeter's time, not only were those revolutions done, but so was the telephone, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the airplane. As such, Schumpeter's pessimism was unforgivable while Karl Marx's was fully understandable.
Third, McCraw makes a shocking mistake by glossing over Schumpeter's lobbying for heavy reparations on the Germans after WW I. He did so by offering calculations that the German economy would easily recover, and therefore could support reparations. The point was fully opposed by John Keynes, who resigned as representative of Britain when the Schumpeterian perspective was used to devastate the Germans with debt burdens. If McCraw had not been at Harvard, or of such fame, it would easily have been a career ending mistake. After all, it is well known that those reparations led to Adolf Hitler and WW II, a point so well understood by 1945 that John Keynes was made the head of the entire postwar economic decisionmaking, precisely why he got to build the World Bank, IMF and Bretton Woods. Schumpeter by contrast was thoroughly discredited.
Fourth, for a business historian of unmatched credibility, McCraw makes a surprising contextual error with regard to Schumpeter's life. He seems to ignore the inevitability of progress, of the drivers of American growth in the early 20th century and absolute irrelevance of Schumpeter to that growth. Perhaps it is his bias as a biographer, or to make the layman buy the book, but it is fatal to the book. Here again, I point to the prior point that Schumpeter was more an economic historian than an economist in the sense that HAD SCHUMPETER NOT LIVED, NONE OF THE GREAT ECONOMIC ADVANCES OF THE 20TH CENTURY, INCLUDING THE VENTURE CAPITAL BUSINESS, WOULD HAVE BEEN HAMPERED. By contrast, without John Keynes, recovery after Sept. 11th, after WW II (when defense spending collapsed and social spending and reconstruction was increased to avoid a collapse of the economy) or in the midst of the Great Depression would have been hard to imagine. Precisely why comparative economic analysis undertaken by McCraw takes the tinge of conservative talk show simplicity. Harvard's economics department would likely have little of his business history about Schumpeter.
Finally, the book would have been a lot stronger had it left the idolization of Schumpeter to the jacket flaps and in the introduction. But repeated compliments only make the reader notice that the author has it wrong, especially when he summarily dismisses karl Marx or John Keynes the way a conservative talk show host would. All Schumpeter was was an immensely readable subject, and an inspiring prosaists who hungered for fame, and whose economic history was impressive, all reasons why you must buy the book and keep it prominently on your book shelf, but he was a flawed economist driven to the wrong conclusions (from reparations to the sustainability of capitalism). His grandiosity was Churchillian, as was his sense of history and society, but unlike Winston Churchill, fate never gave Schumpeter the chance to correct for a lifetime of grandiose errors.
The Basic Paradox of Capitalism.......2007-04-24
As I recently read Thomas K. McCraw's brilliant biography of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), I was intrigued by the evolution of his career after he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Vienna (1906). At age 24, he served as a secretary of state for finance in the new Austrian republic (1919-1920), and later became chairman and president of a Vienna-based Biederman Bank (1920-1924) that collapsed. As a result of that and several substantial investments in companies which also failed, Schumpeter suffered major financial setbacks (both professional and personal) but eventually repaid his debts, then taught at the University of Bonn (1925-1932) before accepting an offer to join the Harvard faculty as a professor of economics where he continued to teach until his death in 1950. McCraw also examines Schumpeter's personal life that, understandably, reflected the successes and failures in his career. For example, Schumpeter fell deeply in love with Anna Josifina Reisinger and married her in 1925. The next year, his beloved mother died and within a month, his wife died in childbirth, as did their son. McCraw suggests that Schumpeter never fully recovered from these personal losses.
Of greatest interest to me is the context or frame-of-reference the biographical material provides for one of Schumpeter's most influential business concepts, "creative destruction," which he introduced in his most popular book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," first published in 1942. Scholars have divided opinions as to the influences on Schumpeter's development of this concept. They probably include Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Werner Sombart.
According to Schumpeter, there is a "process of industrial mutation-if I may use that biological term-that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in." He goes on to explain, "The first thing to go is the traditional conception of the modus operandi of competition. Economists are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they saw. As soon as quality competition and sales effort are admitted into the sacred precincts of theory, the price variable is ousted from its dominant position. However, it is still competition within a rigid pattern of invariant conditions, methods of production and forms of industrial organization in particular, that practically monopolizes attention. But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance) - competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives." (from "The Process of Creative Destruction," 1942) There are countless examples of applications of this concept, notably Jack Welch's determination to "blow up" GE after he succeeded Reginald Jones as CEO.
In his own review of Prophet of Innovation in the Wall Street Journal, Dan Seligman includes Schumpeter's widely quoted question-and-answer sequence: "Can capitalism survive? No, I do not think it can." Seligman then suggests that that answer "is hedged in later passages [in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy]. Even so, it will seem wildly counterintuitive to readers who have read Schumpeter on capitalism's huge successes." I agree. In fact, I presume to suggest that, from Schumpeter's perspective, no form of capitalism can survive and that continuous replacement of one form of capitalism by another confirms the enduring reality of creative destruction. Without it, there can be no innovation. In essence, that is the basic paradox of capitalism.
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Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Wolfgang F. Stolper
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
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ASIN: 0691043051 |
Book Description
In this major scholarly study of the life of Joseph A. Schumpeter, one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century, the distinguished economist Wolfgang Stolper delves into the mind of his former teacher, exploring the development of his ideas and, especially, their influence on politics and public policy. After reflecting briefly on Schumpeter the man, Stolper explains the evolution of Schumpeter's work, particularly his insights during the 1920s on public finance, his contributions to monetary theory and the study of business cycles, and his writings on socialism. Stolper goes on to describe and evaluate Schumpeter's public activities following World War I and his role as a finance minister, placing the development of his thought in the turbulent political context of his times. Drawing on a vast array of new and exciting sources, Stolper paints a portrait of his mentor as a decent, ambitious, and complex man whose many insights into economy and society found their way outside of the academy and into the practical world of economic policy. All readers interested in the history of economic thought and twentieth-century political and intellectual history will find this book invaluable.
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Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher, and Politician
Eduard Marz
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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ASIN: 0300038763 |
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Frank Knight (1885-1972, Henry Simons)
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Pub
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ASIN: 1852785004 |
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This book gives information on studies based on sociology and capitalism.
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Joseph A. Schumpter Historian of Economic Thought: Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought
Lawrence Moss
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 041513353X |
Book Description
Joseph A. Schumpter was one of the greates economists of the twentieth century. His History of Economic Analysis is perhaps the greatest contribution to the history of economics, providing a magisterial account of the development of the subject from Ancient Greece to the mid- twentieth century. This book analyses his contribution to the history of economics, considers its lasting significance and assesses the current state of the field. Contributors include: Mark Perlman, University of Pittsburgh; Roger E. Backhouse, Wesleyan University; Bette Polkinghorn, California State University at Sacramento; Spencer J. Pack, Connecticut College; Steven Pressman, Monmouth College; Antonia Callari, Franklin and Marshall College; Peter J. Boettke and David L. Pychitko, both at SUNY-Oswego.
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The Legacy of Joseph A. Schumpeter (Intellectual Legacies in Modern Economic)
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Pub
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ASIN: 1858985056 |
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Schumpeter's Market: Enterprise and Evolution
David A. Reisman
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing
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ASIN: 1843761645 |
Book Description
Schumpeter was an interdisciplinary political economist who made institutional transformation the centerpiece of his theory of supply and demand. This comprehensive monograph reconstructs and assesses Schumpeter's contribution to the restless economics of entrepreneurship, disequilibrium and search.
Examining the evidence from all of Schumpeter's published work, the book fills a significant gap in the literature of economic thought. Partly because Schumpeter was so prolific, partly because he touched on so many inter-related topics, there have been few books that have sought to span the whole of this important author's influential insights.
This volume will appeal to scholars, students and researchers who are interested in exploring the complexities of Schumpeter's vision and his intellectual system. It will be entirely accessible to non-evolutionary economists. Historians of economic thought will find this a valuable and novel interpretation of Schumpeter's work.
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Schumpeter: A Biography
Richard Swedberg
Manufacturer: Princeton Univ Pr
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ASIN: 0691042969 |
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Change Equation: Capitalizing on Diversity for Effective Organizational Change
J. Renae Norton , and
Ronald E. Fox
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ASIN: 1557983887 |
Customer Reviews:
Success in applied psychology.......1998-10-17
My organization is presently utilizing the unique approach of Drs. Norton and Fox. Having my postgraduate training in both clinical and organizational psychology, I can truly say that their background in clinical psychology is invaluable as applied to organizational diversity initiatives.True organizational change in the area of diversity cannot be sustained without first changing the culture of the organization (a la Schein). Other approaches attempt to cause change by "awareness training" which is an attempt to treat the symptoms, not the causes. If you want the cutting edge approach to what is an unavoidable direction of organizational direction, this is it
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Agricultural Salinity Assessment and Management (Asce Manual and Reports on Engineering Practice)
Manufacturer: Amer Society of Civil Engineers
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ASIN: 0872627624 |
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The Foundations of Magnetic Recording 2E, Second Edition
John C. Mallinson
Manufacturer: Academic Press
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ASIN: 0124666264 |
Book Description
This expanded and updated new edition provides a comprehensive overview of the science and technology of magnetic recording. In the six years since the publication of the first edition, the magnetic recording and storage industry has burgeoned with the introduction of a host of new ideas and technologies. His book contains a discussion of almost every technologically important aspect of recording.
* Continas complete coverage of the current technology of magnetic recording and storage
* Written in a non-mathematical but scientifically accurate style
* Permits intelligent evaluations to be made of both the past evolution and the future trends in a wide variety of magnetic storage devices
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