Quotes about Schumpeter

“Schumpeter had launched a brilliant academic career just before World War I in Vienna. He is said to have made a vow to become the best economist, horseman, and lover in Vienna, and later to have remarked that he had never fully achieved that degree of mastery on a horse. After various vicissitudes, including a brief term as Minister of Finance during Austria’s hyperinflation, he came to Harvard in 1932. Schumpeter was learned and immensely clever, and as a minor foible, a poseur in abstract economic theory. I met him first in 1940 at the meetings of the American Economic Association in New Orleans. He greeted me cordially (characteristically he had read the little I had written) and he soon asked me: “ Are you not reminded, dear colleague, of general equilibrium theory in economics when you read modern mathematical physics?” I doubt that I had the courage to admit that I had sadly neglected mathematical physics, and I surely did not dare tell him that I doubted his own knowledge of that area.”

-George Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, pp.100-1,

"Schumpeter struggled mightily with the research and writing of Business Cycles. As he told his friend and fellow cycle theorist Wesley Clair Mitchell in 1937, "In order to carry out so detailed an investigation as would be necessary I would have to have a whole research staff working for me." To another friend, he wrote, "I am still a slave to my manuscript and for instance … worried last night till 2 a.m.., on such questions as whether potatoes were important enough in Germany in 1790 to count in the business cycle."

Even as he wrote the book, he pursued many other activities. As the undisputed star of the Economics Department, he entertained a stream of visiting scholars, led several faculty discussion groups, spent prodigal amounts of time counseling graduates and undergraduates, and taught a heavy load of courses. He also devoted considerable energy to a second big project—a book on money—but decided to defer (and ultimately to abandon) that effort. By the time he neared completion of Business Cycles, he was "in a state of perfect exhaustion," as he wrote in June 1937. Early in 1938, he reported to Harold Burbank, chairman of the Economics Department, "I am half dead and certainly entirely dazed from the long hours I must spend on rereading and touching up my manuscript.

Today, research efforts comparable to what Schumpeter was trying to do often employ teams of half a dozen statisticians, economists, and other social scientists. But in the 1920s and 1930s, this model of academic research was just getting started, and Schumpeter worked almost entirely on his own. As his student James Tobin recalled, "He didn't recruit students to help him; he didn't suggest topics arising in his own research to students for papers or dissertations; he didn't try out the ideas or findings of his draft chapters in seminars. That so enormous an achievement was the product of lonely research tells what a great scholar Schumpeter was.

- Thomas K. McCraw

Tyler Cowen recommends highly Thomas K. McCraw’s book,Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.