Holiday Reading

So over my little Christmas break, I'm reading Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the seminal economic classic by Joseph Schumpeter.

Now, as everybody no doubt already knows, the thumbnail takeaway of this book is "creative destruction" which is Schumpeter's description of how capitalism progresses: the old and less efficient is swept aside by the new and more efficient.  This can be an unpleasant process for those being swept away but ultimately benefits everyone with a better use of inputs and thus increased prosperity.  (fn1)

At any rate, I figured it would behoove me as an economic dilettante to at least take the measure of those classics that I have not read and decided that Schumpeter was as good a place to start as any.

All of this is by way of saying that I'm on vacation and so posting will be light.  And what little posting there is will most likely be observations of and from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

In his (unnecessarily long, in retrospect) discussion of Marx, I've found my lines of the day:

The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited.  But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.

True.

fn1 One of the earliest examples of this unpleasantness was the luddite uprisings against the new mechanized weaving industry at the very dawn of the industrial revolution.