Joseph Schumpeter quotes - page 3

Surely, nothing can be more plain or even more trite common sense than the proposition that innovation [...] is at the center of practically all the phenomena, difficulties, and problems of economic life in capitalist society. (Joseph Schumpeter)
Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters-perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair-may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple a that. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
The trouble with Russia is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
Capitalism Survive?-I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
It is, after all, only common sense to realize that, but for the fact that economic life is a process of incessant internal change, the business cycle, as we know it, would not exist. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
In economic life competition is never completely lacking, but hardly ever is it perfect. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. (Joseph Schumpeter)
The very foundation of private property and free contracting wears away in a nation in which its most vital, most concrete, most meaningful types of private property and free contracting disappear from the moral horizon of the people. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
There is another method of obtaining money... It does not presuppose the existence of accumulated results of previous development, and hence may be considered as the only one which is available in strict logic. This method of obtaining money is the creation of purchasing power by banks. The form it takes is immaterial. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
Those revolutions are not strictly incessant; they occur in discrete rushes which are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet. The process as a whole works incessantly however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
All we can thus far say about the duration of the units of [the business cycle] and each of [its] two phases is that it will depend on the nature of the particular innovations that carry a cycle,... and the financial conditions and habits prevailing in the business community in each case. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
To the believer Marxism presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age? View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
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. (Joseph Schumpeter)
Want and effective demand are not the same thing. If they were, the poorest nations would be the ones to display the most vigorous demand. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily - and perhaps most tellingly - described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter
For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself. View quote
Joseph Schumpeter