What is Capital?
What is Capital?
In postwar Japan, Joseph Schumpeter was seen as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth. At the heart of this understanding is his conception of capital. Capital in its economic sense can be thought of in two ways, as money-capital and as physical capital. Despite the confusion of naming, the two are quite distinct and behave according to distinct sets of principles. This chapter considers capital mainly in the first, financial sense. This is the sense in which Schumpeter used it. It explores how Schumpeter's ideas of credit-capital creation elucidate basic features of the modern capitalist process that are usually glossed over or misunderstood. They offer insights that Karl Marx's critical analysis of capitalism did not encompass and that most procapitalist analyses shut off from discussion. The fact that Japanese participants in the creation of the High-Speed Growth system took hold of these ideas makes them doubly interesting.
Keywords: capital, Joseph Schumpeter, credit-capital creation, capitalism, high-speed growth
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