by Rick Lowe
Tyler Cowen, who blogs at Marginal Revolution recently reviewed the new biography of Joseph Schumpeter by Thomas K. McCraw. The book is titled Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.
He titled his review, Schumpeter Revealed and here is a little snippet:
Forbes magazine once suggested that Schumpeter, rather than Keynes, is the seminal economist for our time. Schumpeter had a dynamic vision of capitalism, stressed entrepreneurship, and yet saw that a free society was vulnerable to the disloyalty of its intellectuals. Modern capitalist democracy, for Schumpeter, had vanquished the atavistic imperialism of times past, yet it was anything but stable.
Both Schumpeter’s appeal and his mystery stem from the difficulty of placing him in the standard boxes. Reading Schumpeter became a kind of Rorschach test. Was he a straightforward classical liberal, but one who liked playing around with controversial and possibly self-subverting ideas, in the mold of Robert Nozick or John Gray? Or was he a European pessimist first and a political thinker second? He even has been read as a defender of planning who thought that the time for capitalism—for better or worse—had passed. More...
Later on he notes that:
McCraw doesn’t answer every question about Schumpeter but he comes closer than I would have thought possible. Every year there are three or four non-fiction books that have to be read, and this is one of them.
Looks like I have another book on my to buy list.
