(p. 113) It was Joseph Schumpeter who pointed out that the competition which keeps a businessman awake at night is not that from his rivals cutting prices, but that of entrepreneurs making (p. 114) his product obsolete. As Kodak and Fuji slugged it out for dominance in the 35mm film industry in the 1990s, digital photography began to extinguish the entire market for analogue film – as analogue records and analogue video cassettes had gone before. Creative destruction, Schumpeter called it. His point was that there is just as much creation going on as destruction – that the growth of digital photography would create as many jobs in the long run as were lost in analogue, or that the savings pocketed by a Wal-Mart customer are soon spent on other things, leading to the opening of new stores to service those new demands. In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.
Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.