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这篇关于熊彼得的新传记<Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas C. McCraw>的书评很好.请大家先看一下.我原以为熊彼得个人生活顺畅.看完此书,我才发现我是多么地荒唐.
熊彼得也可能最终真比凯恩斯伟大.若如此,他的三大愿望就真有一个实现了:一切还是要从长期来看, 尽管`in the long run, we are all dead.'
邹恒甫
2007年7月25日记.
In the Schumpeter Wing
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/07.04.01.html
Joseph Schumpeter died in 1950, a few weeks before his sixty-seventh birthday, and since then, his reputation as a sage has been appreciating almost constantly, at least outside of economics.
First there was Robert Heilbroner's The
Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great
Economic Thinkers. When the
book appeared in 1953, Schumpeter had the last chapter to himself,
with Heilbroner amplifying the economist's famous 1942 judgment,
in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:
In the 1960s, too, historian Alfred D. Chandler
Jr. published Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of
the American Industrial Enterprise.
On the centenary of Schumpeter's birth, business
guru Peter Drucker wrote him up as being essentially superior to
Keynes, in a widely-remarked cover story in Forbes
magazine. Both men had been born
in 1883, Drucker noted; a hundred years later, Schumpeter, with his
emphasis on an innovating, ever-changing economy, had turned out to
be right, he argued; it was the stagnationist Keynes who got his
ultimate diagnosis wrong.
Now, nearly 60 years after his death, a full-bore biography by a professional historian has arrived, tending to endorse Drucker's earlier judgment and to expand upon it considerably. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas C. McCraw, rescues the great man from playground battles over the role of the public sector in either slackening or quickening the rate of economic growth (or both) and places him on a plane where he truly can be compared as a public figure to his rival. Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes (Hopes Betrayed, The Economist as Savior, Fighting for Freedom) tips the scale at close to ten pounds and some two thousand pages. But McCraw, with nearly 700 pages of his own, makes a plausible case that the Austrian savant was in touch with some pretty ultimate truths, too.
There are at several reasons this book will be
widely read.
And no one will ever follow the great man more
carefully through the intricacies of his career: from the
University of Vienna, where he read Marx and studied under Eugene
Boehm-Bawerk; to the University of Czernowitz, where he fought a
duel with the school librarian over students' right to borrowing
privileges (he won); to the University of Graz, from which he
sallied forth to lecture in English at Columbia University in 1913.
The Great War interrupted his career, but he remained on the
sidelines; afterwards he served a disastrous term as finance
minister of the new Austrian Republic, and another, even more
calamitous appointment as chairman of the Beidermann
Bank.
Then, too, Schumpeter's personal life is highly
interesting. An only child, he was born and educated in the dying
light of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, a textile
manufacturer, was killed in an apparent hunting accident when he
was four; his mother, a strong and magnetic woman, remarried when
he was ten -- to a three-star Austrian general thirty years her
senior. Perhaps that was all that was needed to turn her son, an
only child, into a womanizer of the first rank. Just as Sylvia
Nasar found a wide audience for her life of John Nash by framing
A Beautiful Mind as a love
story, so McCraw has delivered something of a page-turner by
emphasizing the extent to which Schumpeter depended on the women in
his life to buttress his self-image, which was never very strong.
When his mother and beloved second wife died within a few weeks of
one another in 1926 (when he is 43), he turned them into personal
saints, whom he regularly addressed in his journals ever after
as die Hasen,
meaning, literally, rabbits, or, more likely, little pets.
Die Ewig Weibliche, the
Eternal Feminine, was never more in evidence than when he turned to
his diary after giving his presidential Address to the American
Economic Association, in 1948:
(Fifty-three weeks later he died, whereupon his
third wife, the admirable Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, labored over
the manuscript of his last book, A History of Economic
Best of all. McCraw is an extremely good
interpreter of Schumpeter's published work, which, in fact, not
many people have read in anything resembling its entirety. For
instance, I have struggled through most of Capitalism, Socialism
and Democracy, which
Schumpeter correctly refers to in his journal as his "book of
essays."
It turns out, though, that Business Cycles
is not about business cycles
nearly so much as it is about growth. Beneath an extensive crust of
temporizing about highly predictable historical waves -- "Barring
very few cases in which difficulties arise, it is possible to count
off, historically as well as statistically, six Juglars [8-10 year
cycles] to a Kondratieff [50-60 years] and three Kitchins [40
months] to a Juglar" -- there is a lengthy and systematic
comparison of the rise of the business systems of Germany, Great
Britain and the United States. The wave theory was written off
quickly enough by economists as "Pythagorean moonshine," in young
Paul Samuelson's phrase. But its powerful narrative sections -- its
history of the textile industry, of "railroadization," and
electrification, says McCraw, "presaged the emergence of modern,
rigorous business history -- a new academic sub-discipline." Nor,
perhaps, should this be surprising from the man who wrote in 1911,
in The Theory of Economic Development, "The spontaneity of [human] wants is small.
[It is] the producer who as a rule initiated economic change., and
consumers are educated by him, if necessary; they are, as it were,
taught to want new things...."
McGraw identifies Schumpeter's two main claims on
our attention. "[He] is the chief proponent and popularizer of the
word 'entrepreneur,' which appeared in the 1934 English edition of
his Theory of Economic Development. (In the original German edition of 1911, he
had used the German unternehmer, which never caught on, partly because its
literal meaning is 'undertaker.') Because of the importance of
entrepreneurship, and because Schumpeter wrote about it with such
insight and verve, his name will forever be linked with the idea."
(Interestingly enough, the word appears but once in Drucker's
essay. Instead "dynamic disequilibrium," "structural change,"
"innovation," "productivity" and "technological change" do the
heavy lifting there.) The other catchphrase, of course, is
"creative destruction."
To make his tale come out well, McCraw finds
that, more or less at the last moment, Schumpeter abandoned his
life-long quest for an "exact economics" in order to be redeemed by
history.
But in commencing work on A History of Economic Analysis, he unwittingly "entered a new intellectual phase," McCraw says -- one in which he would argue that a "principle of indeterminacy" was at work in human affairs, such that the creative responses of specific individuals to changing circumstances could never be wholly anticipated. "Where he was headed now, mathematics was unlikely to follow." What was needed now was history, and plenty of it, Schumpeter argued, historical case studies designed to address specific standard questions. In his comments on a research plan that led to the creation of the Center for Research in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard, he wrote that such a project could result "in a new wing being added to the economist's house."
And so it has.
At this point I probably should acknowledge that I have a foot planted firmly in the other camp -- the wing of the economists. The flip side of all that literary expression by Schumpeter is that you can get out of him almost anything that you wish. In Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, I argue that a clearer view of economic growth can be obtained today through the use of formal methods. Creative destruction is often now matter-of-factly described as "churn" or "turbulence," its extent and costs and benefits measured through the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program. The study of markets and hierarchies has been largely overhauled by the likes of Michael Jensen, Oliver Williamson and their many students. Our view of the economics of knowledge has been transformed by Paul Romer. So I am somewhat embarrassed to be going on, uninvited, about the great merit of business history in general, and of a definitive biography of Schumpeter in particular.
Indeed, it is the pedagogy that seems to me the
greatest contribution of the group that formed around Chandler,
McCraw and the others at the Harvard Business School. A course
known as "The Coming of Managerial Capitalism" has been taught
there one way or another since the 1920s as an elective. In the
1960s and 1970s, it attracted between twenty and forty students a
year.
The result is that introductory economics, with its analytic bent, remains the single most popular course in the college, completely uncontested by a more plausible account of the path to the present day. History is too important to leave to schools of business, much less to economics departments.