… is from page 56 of Brian Loasby’s paper “Organisation, competition, and the growth of knowledge,” which is chapter 3 of Economics as a Process: Essays in the New Institutional Economics (Richard N. Langlois, ed., 1986) (link added):
As [Burton] Klein (1977) has argued, the stability of a system may be undermined by attempts to stabalise its elements. Thus the failure rate of organisations may not be an indication of system failure but of system success – just as an abundance of refutations may be a sign of rapid scientific progress. Since each organisation embodies a particular cluster of ideas, we might derive from [Karl] Popper’s advice to let our ideas die instead of ourselves the recommendation to let organisations die, as an aid to the growth of knowledge.
DBx: Those people are deeply inconsistent who, with one breath, proclaim enthusiasm for learning, for innovation, for competition, for freedom, and for economic growth but, with the next breath, express fear of today’s particular industries shrinking, of today’s familiar firms going bankrupt, of today’s specific jobs being destroyed, of today’s arrangement of market relationships giving way to a new arrangement guided by entrepreneurial creativity and consumer choice.
