Reducing Schumpeter to "waves" is absurd. I have four of his books, and his interest in waves is mostly in his book on the business cycle. Here he does exhibit a belief in Kondratieff, Kitchen, and whatever that third wave cycle is. It would be far more absurd to discover someone declaring that there will be no more business cycles, which is indeed what we seem to find at every market top. All that Schumpeter was seeking to do was to find some underlying regularity in the business cycle.
Schumpeter can't be accused of quantifying anything, since he was one of the last prominent economists who didn't practice econometrics. That's why he's a joy to read compared to more recent equation riddled economic writing. But he did seem to be impressed with econometrics, which was new to the field at that time. I wonder if he would have been so impressed had he lived longer.
Schumpeter indeed thought that new inventions and innovative methods drove the business cycle. The term "creative destruction" is from Schumpeter. And he, unlike his contemporary Keynes, understood and wrote of the vital role played by entrepreneurs, capital formation, and so forth. |
