Joseph A. Schumpeter
Joseph A. Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-born American economist and political scientist. He briefly served as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932 he became a Professor at Harvard University where he remained until the end of his career. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Schumpeter popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth8 February 1883
CountryUnited States of America
Joseph A. Schumpeter quotes about
freedom democracy trials
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.
eye civilization passing-away
This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.
democracy obstacles rebellious
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
judging defense trials
Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.
obvious treacherous
Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.
ambition order age
Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?
mind marxism bourgeois
Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.
generations looks inferiority
It is quite possible that future generations will look upon arguments about the inferiority of the socialist plan as we look upon Adam Smith's argument about joint stock companies which, also, were simply false.
successful credit levels
Access to the national dividend is usually to be had only on condition of some productive service previously rendered or of some product previously sold. This condition is, in this case, not yet fulfilled. It will be fulfilled only after the successful completion of the new combinations. Hence this credit will in the meantime affect the price level.
excellence saving agents
The banker, therefore, is not so much primarily a middleman in the commodity "purchasing power" as a producer of this commodity. However, since all reserve funds and savings today usually flow to him, and the total demand for free purchasing power, whether existing or to be created, concentrates on him, he has either replaced private capitalists or become their agent; he has himself become the capitalist par excellence.
moving choices wish
Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do-not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose.
pages temperature phrases
The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.
doctors political mind
The state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory that construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.
optimistic vision investing
Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones