Schumpeter

MUCH honoured as an economic prophet, Joseph Schumpeter has had to wait half a century after his death for this splendid full-dress biography covering his ideas, life and times. In 1983 Forbes pronounced him a better guide to the tumultuous world economy than John Maynard Keynes. In 1986 J.K. Galbraith described him as “the most sophisticated conservative of this century”. In 2000 Business Week ran an article about him to which it gave the title “America's hottest economist died fifty years ago”. There are Schumpeter lectures, Schumpeter societies and Schumpeter prizes.
Now he has received yet another accolade: a fat, learned biography by Thomas McCraw, one of America's most respected business historians, the author of a Pulitzer prize-winning history of the rise of regulation. He has found the perfect subject in Schumpeter. He succeeds in getting inside the economist's head, explaining not just what he thought but why he thought it. Beyond this, he also succeeds in painting a portrait of his times. Fin de siècle Vienna, Weimar Germany, Harvard University (where he is seen in our photograph) before and after the first world war: all come to life on these pages.
Most economists live pretty dull lives, dividing their time between technical intellectual problems and tedious academic politics. Even Keynes inhabited a comfortable Bloomsbury cocoon. Schumpeter was anything but dull.