ABSTRACT
Every student of Schumpeter knows the famous boast: that Schumpeter had had ambition to become the world’s greatest lover, the world’s greatest horseman, and the world’s greatest economist; but, alas, he had achieved only two of the three. How much the bon mot actually reveals about Schumpeter’s concerns we will never know. But toward the end of his life he might well have been worried about the last of these hoped-for achievements.1 His great tome Business Cycles (1939) had been trampled in the massive Depression-era stampede toward the theories of the hated Lord Keynes. After World War II, few would have ranked Schumpeter as among the world’s greatest economists; and many indeed would have heard of him only through the filter of John Kenneth Galbraith. Strikingly, the situation today has to some extent reversed itself. Keynes is in eclipse. And Schumpeter – the Schumpeter of the bold entrepreneur, dynamic competition, and economic growth – is in the ascent.2
