48 Facts About Schumpeter

Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-born political economist.

Schumpeter served briefly as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919.

Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized the term "creative destruction", which was coined by Werner Sombart.

Schumpeter was born in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia in 1883 to Catholic German-speaking parents.

Schumpeter did not acknowledge his Czech ancestry; he considered himself an ethnic German.

Related searches

Schumpeter's father owned a factory, but he died when Joseph was only four years old.

Schumpeter was a loyal supporter of Franz Joseph I of Austria.

In 1918, Schumpeter was a member of the Socialization Commission established by the Council of the People's Deputies in Germany.

Schumpeter proposed a capital levy as a way to tackle the war debt and opposed the socialization of the Alpine Mountain plant.

Schumpeter's resignation was a condition of the takeover of the Biedermann Bank in September 1924.

In 1932, Schumpeter moved to the United States and soon began what would become extensive efforts to help central European economist colleagues displaced by Nazism.

Schumpeter became known for his opposition to Marxism and socialism that he thought would lead to dictatorship, and even criticized President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

At Harvard, Schumpeter was considered a memorable character, erudite, and even showy in the classroom.

Schumpeter became known for his heavy teaching load and his personal and painstaking interest in his students.

Schumpeter served as the faculty advisor of the Graduate Economics Club and organized private seminars and discussion groups.

However, Schumpeter persevered, and in 1942 published what became the most popular of all his works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, reprinted many times and in many languages in the following decades, as well as cited thousands of times.

Source of Schumpeter's dynamic, change-oriented, and innovation-based economics was the historical school of economics.

Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous History of Economic Analysis, although some of his judgments seem idiosyncratic and sometimes cavalier.

For instance, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th century economist was Turgot rather than Adam Smith, and he considered Leon Walras to be the "greatest of all economists", beside whom other economists' theories were "like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth".

In fashioning this theory connecting innovations, cycles, and development, Schumpeter kept alive the Russian Nikolai Kondratiev's ideas on 50-year cycles, Kondratiev waves.

Schumpeter suggested a model in which the four main cycles, Kondratiev, Kuznets, Juglar, and Kitchin can be added together to form a composite waveform.

Schumpeter saw these cycles varying in time – although in a tight time frame by coincidence – and for each to serve a specific purpose.

Schumpeter thought that the institution enabling the entrepreneur to buy the resources needed to realize his vision was a well-developed capitalist financial system, including a whole range of institutions for granting credit.

Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy.

Schumpeter disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them.

Related searches

Schumpeter argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that in fact they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda.

Schumpeter defined democracy as the method by which people elect representatives in competitive elections to carry out their will.

Schumpeter faced pushback on his theory from other democratic theorists, such as Robert Dahl, who argued that there is more to democracy than simply the formation of government through competitive elections.

Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to theorize about entrepreneurship, and the field owed much to his contributions.

In Mark I, Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation come from the entrepreneurs or wild spirits.

Contrary to this prevailing opinion, Schumpeter argued that the agents that drive innovation and the economy are large companies that have the capital to invest in research and development of new products and services and to deliver them to customers more cheaply, thus raising their standard of living.

Schumpeter was the most influential thinker to argue that long cycles are caused by innovation and are an incident of it.

Schumpeter's treatise brought Kondratiev's ideas to the attention of English-speaking economists.

Schumpeter sees innovations as clustering around certain points in time periods that he refers to as "neighborhoods of equilibrium", when entrepreneurs perceive that risk and returns warrant innovative commitments.

Schumpeter identified innovation as the critical dimension of economic change.

Schumpeter argued that economic change revolves around innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and market power.

Schumpeter sought to prove that innovation-originated market power can provide better results than the invisible hand and price competition.

Schumpeter argued that technological innovation often creates temporary monopolies, allowing abnormal profits that would soon be competed away by rivals and imitators.

World Bank's "Doing Business" report was influenced by Schumpeter's focus on removing impediments to creative destruction.

Schumpeter's second was Anna Reisinger, 20 years his junior and daughter of the concierge of the apartment where he grew up.

Five years after arriving to the US, in 1937, at the age of 54, Schumpeter married the American economic historian Dr Elizabeth Boody, who helped him popularize his work and edited what became their magnum opus, the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis.

Schumpeter claimed that he had set himself three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, to be the best horseman in all of Austria, and the greatest lover in all of Vienna.

Schumpeter said he had reached two of his goals, but he never said which two, although he is reported to have said that there were too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations.

Some time after his death, Schumpeter's views were most influential among various heterodox economists, especially Europeans, who were interested in industrial organization, evolutionary theory, and economic development, and who tended to be on the other end of the political spectrum from Schumpeter and were often influenced by Keynes, Karl Marx, and Thorstein Veblen.

Robert Heilbroner was one of Schumpeter's most renowned pupils, who wrote extensively about him in The Worldly Philosophers.

Related searches

Today, Schumpeter has a following outside standard textbook economics, in areas such as economic policy, management studies, industrial policy, and the study of innovation.

Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to develop theories about entrepreneurship.

The initial Schumpeter column praised him as a "champion of innovation and entrepreneurship" whose writing showed an understanding of the benefits and dangers of business that proved to be far ahead of its time.