What would Joseph Schumpeter have made of Apple?

inconvenient truth about Joseph Schumpeter, patron saint of this column. As an economist, his biggest contribution was to single out entrepreneurs as core to the business cycle. Early in his career he made champions of them, describing them as swashbuckling iconoclasts who overthrow the existing order motivated by sheer chutzpah. Yet later in life, when he coined his famous term “creative destruction”, he applied it not to such individuals but to industrial behemoths, even monopolies. They were compelled to innovate in order to “keep on their feet, on ground that is slipping away from under them”, he wrote. A far cry from the entrepreneurial heroes of his youth. In his new book, “The Entrepreneurs”, Derek Lidow puts this into historical context. When the young Schumpeter wrote “The Theory of Economic Development” in 1911, it was at the end of a long period of unfettered enterprise during the first century of the Industrial Revolution. But in the run-up to the second world war, when Schumpeter wrote his most famous work, “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, the buccaneers of yore had morphed into large conglomerates with vast research-and-development (&) labs in which they invested fortunes to remain competitive.