It seems to me that Schumpeter was no democrat. Nor could he have foreseen today's dilemma in America where a few billionaires have become so powerful that they are able to subvert the democratic process (ref. With the benefit of hindsight I'm perhaps being unfair in judging the book on its merits, since Schumpeter could not have foreseen the calamitous outcome of the Soviet "planned economy". Lost in the titanic struggle between those two competing ideologies is democracy which, as it turns out today, cannot truly survive under either regime. The book is colored very much by the widespread debate of his day (WW2 era) as to whether capitalism or socialism would prevail. Further, he naïvely discounted the authoritarian nature of the Russian experiment of his day, suggesting that the degree of coercion in the soviet model would be relaxed as conditions improved, which they did not. Schumpeter speculates about the possibility of a democratic socialist utopia, but he unconvincingly discounts the reality of human acquisitiveness and the desire for upward mobility. Schumpeter is best remembered for having coined the term "creative destruction" a process well understood today whereby entire industries and the jobs that go with them are continually rendered obsolete as new products, new technologies, new ways to make money emerge.
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