Friday, October 21, 2022

Schumpeter's opening words are apocalyptic: "Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can."

From Mises.org, a review:

[Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Global Economy • 
By Joseph Schumpeter • New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009 • 208 pages]

.....Capitalism provides the means the intellectuals require to attack it: innovations that make disseminating opinion both possible and extremely inexpensive; education delivered to enough of the population to provide an audience big enough to influence lasting social changes; and perhaps most important, capitalism encourages the principle of freedom of expression which is necessary for public criticism of social institutions (pp. 155–179).

Schumpeter's insights into the sociological and psychological characteristics of the intellectual class are breathtaking:

The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.… All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unsatisfactorily unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals … whose numbers increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into … social criticism … [and] moral disapproval of the capitalist order. (pp. 173–175)

Thus the intellectual opposition is built and supplied with weapons by the very system that it opposes. Through no fault of its own, the capitalist system is attacked by those whose very occupations are made possible by the efforts of the entrepreneurs and capitalists who drive the economy in a ceaseless process of innovation and improvement....

....MUCH MORE