Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- I Equilibrium Economics and Evolutionary Economics
- II The Evolutionary Trilogy
- 6 Approaching the Evolutionary Trilogy
- 7 The Capitalist Engine and Socio-Political Evolution
- 8 Waveform Economic Evolution and Business Cycles
- 9 The Basic Mechanisms of Economic Evolution
- III Works in Progress
- Appendices
- Schumpeter's Works
- Other References
- Index of Schumpeter's Works
- Index of Persons
8 - Waveform Economic Evolution and Business Cycles
from II - The Evolutionary Trilogy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- I Equilibrium Economics and Evolutionary Economics
- II The Evolutionary Trilogy
- 6 Approaching the Evolutionary Trilogy
- 7 The Capitalist Engine and Socio-Political Evolution
- 8 Waveform Economic Evolution and Business Cycles
- 9 The Basic Mechanisms of Economic Evolution
- III Works in Progress
- Appendices
- Schumpeter's Works
- Other References
- Index of Schumpeter's Works
- Index of Persons
Summary
Although Schumpeter made several attempts of elaborating and applying the basic model of the capitalist engine that he had presented in Entwicklung I and Development, the results of his major effort are found in Business Cycles. This book has roots back to his student years. At that time, members of the historical school (like Sombart and Spiethoff) had begun to focus on the problem of crises and cycles. Furthermore, this problem seems to have been a hot issue in Vienna among the participants in the seminars of the economic theoretician Böhm-Bawerk and the statistician and economic historian Inama-Sternegg. It is thus hardly surprising that Schumpeter put it at the top of his research agenda from the very beginning (see Section 5.4). However, he thereby not only set himself apart from the older generation of neoclassical economists who tended to ignore crises and cycles. It later became clear that his evolutionary theorising about business cycles was also radically different from the studies of business cycles that boomed in the 1920s and 1930s. The most obvious difference is that while nearly everybody else considered business cycles pathological, Schumpeter considered the phenomenon as part of the healthy process of economic evolution under capitalist conditions. Actually, his two-stroke model of the capitalist engine (see Figure 6.2 on page 149) suggested that waves are essential for capitalist economic evolution.
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- Information
- Schumpeter's Evolutionary EconomicsA Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Engine of Capitalism, pp. 189 - 240Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009