Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter's Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle
Mark Metzler
Abstract
Joseph Schumpeter's conceptions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction have been hugely influential. He pioneered the study of economic development and of technological paradigm shifts and was a forerunner of the emerging field of evolutionary economics. He is not thought of as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth, but this is what he became in postwar Japan. As this book shows, economists and planners in postwar Japan seized upon Schumpeter's ideas and put them directly to work. The inflationary creation of credit, as theorized by Schumpeter, was a vital but ... More
Joseph Schumpeter's conceptions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction have been hugely influential. He pioneered the study of economic development and of technological paradigm shifts and was a forerunner of the emerging field of evolutionary economics. He is not thought of as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth, but this is what he became in postwar Japan. As this book shows, economists and planners in postwar Japan seized upon Schumpeter's ideas and put them directly to work. The inflationary creation of credit, as theorized by Schumpeter, was a vital but mostly unrecognized aspect of the successful stabilization of Japanese capitalism after World War II and was integral to Japan's postwar success. It also helps to explain Japan's bubble, and the global bubbles that have followed it. The heterodox analysis presented in the book goes beyond the economic history of postwar Japan; it opens up a new view of the core circuits of modern capital in general.
Keywords:
Joseph Schumpeter,
economic development,
technological paradigm shifts,
evolutionary economics,
postwar Japan,
Japanese capitalism,
modern capital,
entrepreneurship,
innovation,
creative destruction
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780801451799 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801451799.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Mark Metzler, author
Associate Professor of History, the University of Texas, Austin
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