Joseph Schumpeter quotes

Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist and political scientist, renowned for his theories on economic development and innovation. His concept of "creative destruction" profoundly influenced modern economic thought. He remains a key figure in the study of entrepreneurship and capitalism. Here are 74 of his quotes:

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Joseph Schumpeter

The ballot is stronger than bullets.

Joseph Schumpeter

Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.

Joseph Schumpeter

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Joseph Schumpeter

When we inquire about the general forms of economic phenomena, about their uniformities, or about a key to understanding them, we ipso facto indicate that we wish at that moment to consider them as something to be investigated, to be sought for, as the "unknown”; and that we wish to trace them to the relatively "known,” just as any science deals with its object of inquiry.

Joseph Schumpeter

The swarm-like appearance of new combinations easily and necessarily explains the fundamental features of periods of boom.

Joseph Schumpeter

Economists have never allowed their analysis to be influenced by psychologists of their time, but have always framed for themselves such assumptions about psychical processes as they have thought it desirable to make.

Joseph Schumpeter

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph Schumpeter

Why do entrepreneurs appear, not continuously, that is singly in every appropriately chosen interval, but in clusters? Exclusively because the appearance of one or a few entrepreneurs facilitates the appearance of others, and these the appearance of more, in ever-increasing numbers.

Joseph Schumpeter

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.

Joseph Schumpeter

Chentlemen, you are vorried about the depression[sic]. You should not be. For capitalism, a depression is a good, cold douche.

Joseph Schumpeter

The innovation is hazardous, impossible for most producers. But if someone establishes a business having regard to this source of supply, and everything goes well, then he can produce a unit of product more cheaply, while at first the existing prices substantially continue to exist. He then makes a profit. Again he has contributed nothing but will and action, has done nothing but recombine existing factors. Again he is an entrepreneur, his profit entrepreneurial profit. And again the latter, and also the entrepreneurial function as such, perish in the vortex of the competition which streams after them. The case of the choice of new trade routes belongs here.

Joseph Schumpeter

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

Joseph Schumpeter

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

Joseph Schumpeter

Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.

Joseph Schumpeter

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Joseph Schumpeter

In all cases, not only in the two which we have analyzed, recovery came of itself. There is certainly this much of truth in the talk about the recuperative powers of our industrial system. But this is not all: our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does come of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another crisis ahead. Particularly, our story provides a presumption against remedial measures which work through money and credit. For the trouble is fundamentally not with money and credit, and policies of this class are particularly apt to keep up, and add to, maladjustment, and to produce additional trouble in the future.

Joseph Schumpeter

Only a few people have these qualities of leadership and only a few in such a situation, that is a situation which is not itself already a boom, can succeed in this direction. However, if one or a few have advanced with success many of the difficulties disappear. Others can then follow these pioneers, as they will clearly do under the stimulus of the success now attainable. Their success again makes it easier, through the increasingly complete removal of the obstacles analysed in the second chapter, for more people to follow suit, until finally the innovation becomes familiar and the acceptance of it a matter of free choice.

Joseph Schumpeter

The more the process of development becomes familiar and a mere matter of calculation to all concerned, and the weaker the obstacles become in the course of time, the less the "leadership” that will be needed to call forth innovations. Hence the less pronounced will become the swarm-like appearance of entrepreneurs and the milder the cyclical movement.

Joseph Schumpeter

At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.

Joseph Schumpeter

Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.

Joseph Schumpeter

The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.

Joseph Schumpeter