Happy Birthday (posthumously, of course) to Joseph Schumpeter (a.k.a., Jozsi, Schum, Schumy, Schump, Go-Go, and probably some less flattering names as well), born on February 8, 1883.
We’ve had a lot of fun with Schumpter over the past few years, including several iterations of Schumptoberfest (see here, here, and here), as well as an entire reading group built around him. Let’s hope that we can instill just a little bit of this into our student body:
Economists are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they saw. As soon as quality competition and sales effort are admitted into the sacred precincts of theory, the price variable is ousted from its dominant position… But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance)–competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives. (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 84).
We’ll see you for Schumptoberfest 2013.