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Schumpeter on Politicians

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I am thoroughly enjoying Prophet of Innovation [2], Thomas McCraw’s new biography of Joseph Schumpeter.  Reading it reminds me of a long-harbored desire of mine to do a blog-post filled with many of the stunningly brilliant insights from Part II (“Can Capitalism Survive?”) of Schumpeter’s remarkable 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [3].  (I first read this book as an undergraduate, a happy fact that forever immunized me against taking textbook theories of competition too seriously.)  I’ll do that blog post soon.  For now, though, I content myself with sharing these two quotations that McCraw reports (on page 405 of his biography) are from the mid-1940s Schumpeter’s diary:

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they go.

And

A statesman is the criminal who works with phrases instead of with the burglar’s jimmy.

(Don’t miss Russ’s podcast with Thomas McCraw [4].)

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