Over at the Washington Examiner’s Opinion Zone, I give nanotechnology a Schumpeterian treatment. In the long run, a competitive, cut-throat market process driven by innovation is better for consumers than if government were to fund and direct research:
A nanotech firm that lives mostly off of government grants lives a sheltered, more docile existence. It doesn’t need to come up with new products that save peoples’ lives, or make them better. They just have to be good at getting grants.
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In the tradition of the Reader’s Digest condensation of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Joseph Schumpeter’s Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy is coming out on September 1.
Can Capitalism Survive? is a condensation of Schumpeter’s 431-page masterwork of 1942, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The timing couldn’t be better. With economic crisis and recession dominating the news, people are as interested in the topic as ever. The trouble is, they don’t understand it very well.…
My reaction to Lehman Brothers’ declaring of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the refusal of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and others to take extraordinary Bear Stearns-like measures for the government to prop the firm up can be summed up in three words: It’s about time!
Business failure is not only a permissible outcome of capitalism, it’s a necessary one. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter has written, the process of “creative destruction” is essential for the market to function. For innovation to flourish…
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