“ Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” Thus opens Schumpeter’s prologue to a section of his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. One might think, on the basis of the quote, that Schumpeter was a Marxist. But the analysis that led Schumpeter to his conclusion differed totally from Karl Marx’s. Marx believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its enemies (the proletariat), whom capitalism had purportedly exploited, and he relished the prospect. Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes, that it would spawn a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class’s existence. And unlike Marx, Schumpeter did not relish the destruction of capitalism. “If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently,” he wrote, “this does not mean that he desires it.”
Please feel free to read the remaining article here. Schumpeter coined the words “creative destruction” to describe the process of innovation that takes place in a capitalistic system to make old ideas, skills, technologies and organizations obsolete.
In a series of posts (starting from here) C. Titus Brown presented his vision for ‘creative destruction’ of internet to transform the way we do scientific research. What is sad, of course, is his antagonism towards capitalism and seeing students not suffering through grant-writing process as loss to science. Going back in history, in 1989, NSF bid to increase their grant level with the stated goal of lowering the salaries of science PhDs (which they saw as too high) through ‘overproduction’. The NSF stated:
A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students’ home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A… [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay… A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths… For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative.
Essentially, CTB wants to build his science castle with funding from the same central planning agencies, who want to discourage his students from staying in science !! On the other hand, there is expectation that government will find money to fund scientific research no matter what happens to capitalistic process of people and businesses working for profit entities. American academia is possibly too married to MMT, by which, governments can have unlimited resources through printing money to guide productive processes. Here is an interesting article to read in above context –