Joseph Schumpeter


Austrian/Moravian-born American Economist, Sociologist and Political Scientist

Author Quotes


Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.



We always plan too much and always think too little.


History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.



I felt it my duty…to inflict upon the reader…my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements.

Credit creation [is] the monetary complement of innovation. This relation…is at the bottom of all the problems of money and credit.

You can’t save your way to wealth—either personally or as a nation. True wealth accrues mainly through innovation. Individual fortunes are built that way, as is the commonwealth.

Profit…is the premium put upon successful innovation in capitalist society and is temporary by nature: it will vanish in the subsequent process of competition and adaptation.

Most new firms are founded with an idea and for a definite purpose. The life goes out of them when that idea or purpose has been fulfilled or has become obsolete or even if, without having become obsolete, it has ceased to be new. That is the fundamental reason why firms do not exist forever. Many of them are, of course, failures from the start. Like human beings, firms are constantly being born that cannot live. Others may meet…death from accident or illness. Still others die a "natural" death, as men die of old age. And the "natural" cause, in the case of firms, is precisely their inability to keep up the pace in innovating which they themselves had been instrumental in setting in the time of their vigor.

It is by no means farfetched or paradoxical to say that "progress" unstabilizes the economic world, or that it is by virtue of its mechanism a cyclical process.

Innovation is the outstanding fact in the economic history of capitalist society or in what is purely economic in that history, and also it is largely responsible for most of what we would at first sight attribute to other factors.



Consumers’ satisfaction supplies the social meaning for all [capitalist] economic activity.

We must always start from the satisfaction of wants, since they are the end of all production.


Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

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.



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Austrian/Moravian-born American Economist, Sociologist and Political Scientist