Creative Destruction – Page 25

“Three Generations from Overalls to Overalls”

(p. 156) Because it proceeds by competitively destroying old businesses and hence the existences dependent upon them, there always corresponds to it a process of decline, of loss of caste, of elimination. This fate also threatens the entrepreneur whose powers are declining, or his heirs who have inherited his wealth without his ability. This is not only because all individual profits dry up, the competitive mechanism tolerating no permanent surplus values, but rather annihilating them by means of just this stimulus of the striving for profits which is the mechanism’s driving force; but also because in the normal case things so happen that entrepreneurial success embodies itself in the ownership of a business; and this business is usually carried on further by the heirs on what soon become traditional lines until new entrepreneurs supplant it. An American adage expresses it: three generations from overalls to overalls. And so it may be. Exceptions are rare, and are more than compensated for by cases in which the descent is still faster. Because there are always entrepreneurs and relatives and heirs of entrepreneurs, public opinion and also the phraseology of the social struggle readily overlook these facts. They constitute “the rich” a class of inheritors who are removed from life’s battle. In fact, the upper strata of society are like hotels which are indeed always full of people, but people who are forever changing.

Source:
Schumpeter, Joseph A. The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. Translated by Redvers Opie. translation of 2nd German edition that appeared in 1926; translation first published by Harvard in 1934 ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Company Graveyard Scene from Wattenberg’s “In Search of the Real America”

Source of image: screen capture downloaded on 9/3/08 from: http://cgi.ebay.com/PBS-TV-SERIES-IN-SEARCH-OF-THE-REAL-AMERICA-1977_W0QQitemZ330267803398QQihZ014QQcategoryZ63821QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

For years I have been trying to find a copy of Ben Wattenberg’s wonderful opening scene in the episode on big business of his 1970s series “In Search of the Real America.” He stands in a spooky, foggy, graveyard next to several tombstones. When we see the tombstones more closely, they have the names of big business corporate failures.

L.E.D.’s as the Next Leapfrog Advance in Light

A few years ago I presented a paper at the meetings of Society for Social Studies of Science in which I mentioned Nordhaus’s wonderful paper in which he measures advances in technology that produce illumination. Some of the technologies represent leapfrog advances that are part of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.
At the end of my presentation, a member of the audience gave me a reference to the new L.E.D. light technology that he suggested was the next leapfrog advance. (Alas, I do not remember his name.)

(p. C3) L.E.D. bulbs, with their brighter light and longer life, have already replaced standard bulbs in many of the nation’s traffic lights. Indeed, the red, green and yellow signals are — aside from the tiny blinking red light on a DVD player, a cellphone or another electronic device — probably the most familiar application of the technology.

But it is showing up in more prominent spots. The ball that descends in Times Square on New Year’s Eve is illuminated with L.E.D.’s. And the managers of the Empire State Building are considering a proposal to light it with L.E.D. fixtures, which would allow them to remotely change the building’s colors to one of millions of variations.
. . .
The problem, though, is the price. A standard 60-watt incandescent usually costs less than $1. An equivalent compact fluorescent is about $2. But in Europe this September, Philips, the Dutch company dealing in consumer electronics, health care machines and lighting, is to introduce the Ledino, its first L.E.D. replacement for a standard incandescent. Priced at $107 a bulb, it is unlikely to have more than a few takers.
“L.E.D. performance is there, but the price is not,” said Kevin Dowling, a Philips Lighting vice president . . .
. . .
“The Marcus Center lighting will require no maintenance for 15 years,” Mr. Gregory said. “That’s a dream for a lighting designer.”
But he does not expect standard bulbs to disappear totally. Just as the invention of the light bulb did not completely kill the candle and kerosene lamp markets, Mr. Gregory said, “there will always be a need for incandescent bulbs. They will never totally go away.”
“The way an incandescent bulb plays on the face on a Broadway makeup mirror,” he said, “you can never duplicate that.”

For the full story, see:
ERIC A. TAUB. “Fans of L.E.D.’s Say This Bulb’s Time Has Come.” The New York Times (Mon., July 28, 2008): C3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The reference to the Nordhaus paper is:
Nordhaus, William D. “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Light Suggests Not.” In The Economics of New Goods, edited by Robert J. Gordon and Timothy F. Bresnahan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press for National Bureau of Economic Research, 1997, pp. 29-66.

“The full spectrum of color, design and programming available for the Times Square ball.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Leapfrog Competition Among Three Firms in Jet-Engine Oligopoly

“Pratt & Whitney hopes its Geared Turbo Fan engine will defy skeptics and win it a spot on the next generation of jets from Boeing and Airbus.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Once every 20 years or so, the companies that make jet engines battle it out for a chance to power the next generation of single-aisle airplanes.
. . .
General Electric Co. unveiled plans to develop a new family of engine cores that it said would vault it ahead of United Technologies Corp.’s Pratt & Whitney, which has a two-year head start on a novel engine that promises to burn 12% less fuel than today’s best engines.
GE, which is working with French partner Safran SA, said its engine will have fewer moving parts than Pratt & Whitney’s, and will deliver equal or better performance. “We’ve been pretty quiet for the last couple of years, but we’ve been doing plenty of work in secret,” said GE Aviation President David Joyce, in an interview. “So be it. Game on.”
. . .
Besides GE and Pratt & Whitney, the other major player in the industry is Britain’s Rolls-Royce PLC. Hoping to dominate the market, all three companies plan to spend well over $1 billion on their new engines, stretching the limits of their technology. Developing fuel-efficient engines requires the use of exotic alloys and ceramic coatings that can cope with internal engine temperatures that would be above the melting points of untreated metal components.
The next generation of engines may look radically different from those used today. One design that GE and Rolls-Royce are exploring separately would have a double row of propellers at the (p. B3) back end of the engine, with no protective covering. Such an engine would be noisier and significantly slower than today’s planes. It also would have to be mounted at the rear of the airplane, but the companies say it would consume as much as 24% less fuel.
. . .
Pratt & Whitney had hoped to get a boost in the engine race by promoting a design called the Geared Turbo Fan. It uses a gearbox at the front of the engine that allow various fans and compressors to turn at different speeds for greater efficiency and less noise. . . .
. . .
The company has been working on the gear technology for almost 20 years, investing almost $1 billion so far, Mr. Finger said. He said that in addition to fuel and emissions savings, the new engine will cut noise by a factor of two and reduce maintenance by 40% because it will have fewer moving parts throughout the engine.

For the full story, see:
J. LYNN LUNSFORD and DANIEL MICHAELS. “Jet-Engine Makers Launch New War; Billions of Dollars at Stake in Race To Develop Efficient Power Source For Next Wave of Boeing, Airbus Planes.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 14, 2008): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“GE is creating an engine with fewer moving parts than Pratt & Whitney’s design, and seeks to deliver equal or better performance.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

For Some Purposes Leapfrogged Technologies Remain Better

“Hachette’s audio department recently held a “funeral” for cassette tapes; an invitation is above.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The article quoted below mentions a feature of new “leapfrog” technologies that has received too little attention. The new product, overall, for most purposes, or for most important purposes, is better than the old product, but it may be that the new product lacks some features that the old product had, that had value. It is a step forward in most respects, but not in all respects.
I salute the observation in the last quoted paragraph below. When I am listening to a book, while walking Willy, some UPS truck often passes me, noisily making a sentence of two inaudible. If I’m listening to a cassette, I can back up a few sentences. If I’m listening to a CD, I have to back up at least a few minutes, and often many minutes (depending on how short the tracks are on the CD).
I remember an early word processor (can’t remember its name, maybe it was Wordmarc), that allowed you to type in the page number of a long document and then go directly to that page. I am currently writing a book using Microsoft Word. And in the vast majority of respects it is better than the word processor of yore. But every time I have to scroll and scroll and scroll, to get to a page, when I already know exactly which page I want, I irrationally curse Bill Gates.

Addendum posted 10/10/08:
Since this post was created on July 30, 2008, I have discovered that Word 2007 has the feature that I missed from Wordmarc, and I also learned that if I had invested more time in Word 2003, I might have discovered that by drilling down to an obscure option menu, it too could have been customized to have had the feature. (In Wordmarc the feature was real obvious.)

(p. C7) There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.
The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)
. . .
Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN. “Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes.” The New York Times (Mon., July 28, 2008): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

McCraw Identifies Schumpeter’s “Signature Legacy”

McCraw is correct in identifying Schumpeter’s “signature legacy”:

(p. 495) Schumpeter’s signature legacy is his insight that innovation in the form of creative destruction is the driving force not only of capitalism but of material progress in general.

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Harvard Professor Doriot Used Venture Capital to Finance the Digital Equipment Corporation

Source of book image: http://creativecapital.wordpress.com/category/how-to-buy-creative-capital/

Doriot taught at Harvard during the whole time that Joseph Schumpeter taught at Harvard. Given that their interests apparently overlapped, it is surprising that there are no references to Schumpeter or to “creative destruction” in Ante’s book.
There are also no references to Doriot in McCraw’s recent comprehensive intellectual biography of Schumpeter.
(Scherer in his essay “An Accidental Schumpeterian” mentions taking a useful course from Doriot, but does not illuminate the relationship, if any, between Doriot and Schumpeter.)

(p. A17) Before Sand Hill Road near Stanford University became the center of the venture-capital universe – before Google and Pets.com – the modern market for financing risky startup companies took shape far from Silicon Valley in the years after World War II.

ARD was the first to raise what was then known as “risk capital” from outsiders at a time when investors’ wounds were still fresh from the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s. The high failure rate of start-ups had generally precluded raising money from average investors. And so ARD’s chief competitors in the postwar years were the Rockefellers and another old-money operation, J.H. Whitney & Co.
. . .
The company would hardly merit attention except for its one grand slam, Digital Equipment Corp., which helped establish the East Coast high-tech stronghold along Route 128 outside Boston.
Digital, a minicomputer maker co-founded by former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer Ken Olsen, received $70,000 from ARD in 1957 in return for a 70% stake, which eventually grew in value to hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Ante calculates the investment’s return at 70,000%.
. . .
Doriot, who taught at Harvard for 40 years, beginning in 1926, offered a popular class that was ostensibly about manufacturing but was more a seminar in his business philosophy. “He stressed common sense themes such as self-improvement, teamwork, and contributing to society,” Mr. Ante writes. Doriot was known for “spicing up his philosophy with practical and pithy words of advice.” Among them: “Always remember that someone somewhere is making a product that will make your product obsolete.”

For the full review, see:

RANDALL SMITH. “Bookshelf; Money to Make Things New.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 21, 2008): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Reference to the biography of Doriot:
Ante, Spencer E. Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008.

Soros Warns Against Too Much Creative Destruction

Investor George Soros as the boy who cried “wolf” one time too often. Source of Soros caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

I have mixed feelings about George Soros. He likes Karl Popper, and I like Karl Popper. He donated a bunch of money to help worthy scholars in Eastern Europe, and financed a conference in Romania on private philanthropy, at which I gave a presentation.
On the other hand, he has also given a bunch of money to politicians who oppose economic freedom. And I think the high level of government regulation he favors would greatly reduce innovation.

(p. B2) WSJ: Are you getting recognition from heavyweights in academia or policy making?
Mr. Soros: It has certainly not penetrated academia, and not policy makers either. There was an article in The Wall Street Journal about people doing research on bubbles at Princeton, so I’m going to meet with one of them. I wish I could engage in a discussion with [the Federal Reserve]. I’m waiting for a phone call. I’m [meeting with] Alan Greenspan.
WSJ: But you are quite critical of Greenspan.
Mr. Soros: Greenspan is one of the great manipulators of financial markets. I mean it in a good way. He managed [in 2001] to forestall a more serious recession. He kept interest rates [low] too long. And he did not heed the warnings that lending standards were being lowered, that deceptive practices were being used. He was too much of a market fundamentalist. He believed that if you leave it to markets, everything will be all right. That’s initially self-reinforcing, but eventually self-defeating.
WSJ: Greenspan argues that the benefits of innovation are worth the occasional bubble.
Mr. Soros: This is, of course, [Joseph] Schumpeter’s creative destruction idea. However … going overboard in generating change is not necessarily a good thing. Financial innovation may not be an unmixed blessing because it really prevents proper regulation.
If you look at the 19th century, you had creative destruction going on, one financial crisis after another. But each time you had a crisis, you had an examination of what went wrong, and you put in some instrument or some institution to prevent it from happening.
I’m not advocating … central planning because that’s worse than markets. But the regulators need to learn from the mistakes that they have made. I think it’s pretty clear that you’ve got to accept responsibility for moderating asset bubbles. … That involves regulating credit as well as [interest rates].

For the full story, see:
GREG IP. “Soros, the Man Who Cries Wolf, Now Is Warning of a ‘Superbubble’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 21, 2008): B1-B2.
(Note: brackets and ellipses in original.)
(Note: I am grateful to Jamie McDonald for calling this article to my attention.)

McCain “Shows a Lack of Understanding of the Insights of Joseph Schumpeter”

I agree with the Karl Rove’s analysis below, that John McCain does not exhibit much understanding of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction. On the other hand, I have seen no evidence that Barack Obama has any such understanding either. (Nor have I seen any evidence that Rove’s former boss, George W. Bush, has any such understanding, for that matter.)
And, in general, I am still of the belief that, overall, between the two of them, McCain will put fewer obstacles in the path of innovation than will Obama.

(p. A13) This past Thursday, Mr. McCain came close to advocating a form of industrial policy, saying, “I’m very angry, frankly, at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they’ve made, but their failure to invest in alternate energy.”
But oil and gas companies report that they have invested heavily in alternative energy. Out of the $46 billion spent researching alternative energy in North America from 2000 to 2005, $12 billion came from oil and gas companies, making the industry one of the nation’s largest backers of wind and solar power, biofuels, lithium-ion batteries and fuel-cell technology.
Such investments, however, are not as important as money spent on technologies that help find and extract more oil. Because oil companies invested in innovation and technology, they are now tapping reserves that were formerly thought to be unrecoverable. Maybe we are all better off when oil companies invest in what they know, not what they don’t.
And do we really want the government deciding how profits should be invested? If so, should Microsoft be forced to invest in Linux-based software or McDonald’s in weight-loss research?
Mr. McCain’s angry statement shows a lack of understanding of the insights of Joseph Schumpeter, the 20th century economist who explained that capitalism is inherently unstable because a “perennial gale of creative destruction” is brought on by entrepreneurs who create new goods, markets and processes. The entrepreneur is “the pivot on which everything turns,” Schumpeter argued, and “proceeds by competitively destroying old businesses.”
Most dramatic change comes from new businesses, not old ones. Buggy whip makers did not create the auto industry. Railroads didn’t create the airplane. Even when established industries help create new ones, old-line firms are often not as nimble as new ones. IBM helped give rise to personal computers, but didn’t see the importance of software and ceded that part of the business to young upstarts who founded Microsoft.
So why should Mr. McCain expect oil and gas companies to lead the way in developing alternative energy? As with past technological change, new enterprises will likely be the drivers of alternative energy innovation.

For the full story, see:
KARL ROVE. “Obama and McCain Spout Economic Nonsense.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., June 19, 2008): A13.
(Note: I thank John Pagin and Dagny Diamond for alerting me to Rove’s discussion of Schumpeter.)

Ordinary People Have Prospered in Recent Decades

Source of image: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post_2174.html

Stephen Moore is right when he calls Drew Carey’s “Living Large” video “wonderful.”
It would be even more wonderful, if it gave a bit more emphasis, a la Schumpeter, to the positive effects of new products, in addition to its emphasis on declining prices of already existing products.

(p. W11) A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the state of the economy to a group of college students — almost all Barack Obama enthusiasts — who were griping about how downright awful things are in America today. As they sipped their Starbucks lattes and adjusted their designer sunglasses, they recited their grievances: The country is awash in debt “that we will have to pay off”; the middle class in shrinking; the polar ice caps are melting; and college is too expensive.
I’ve been speaking to groups like this one for more than 20 years, but I have never confronted such universal pessimism from a young audience. Its members acted as if the hardships of modern life are making it nearly impossible for them to get out of bed in the morning. So I conducted a survey of these grim youngsters. How many of you, I asked, own a laptop? A cellphone? An iPod, a DVD player, a flat-screen digital TV? To every question somewhere between two-thirds and all of the hands in the room rose. But they didn’t even get my point. “Well, duh,” one of them scoffed, “who doesn’t have an iPod these days?” I was way too embarrassed to tell them that I, for one, don’t. They thought that living without these products would be like going back to prehistoric times.
They seemed clueless that as recently as the early 1980s only the richest people in the world had cellphones and the quality of these products left much to be desired. Watch a movie from 20 years ago and you will laugh out loud seeing big clunky black machines that weighed as much as a brick, gave crackly service and cost $4,200. Now cellphones are practically free — even disposable. And the cost of making calls has dropped dramatically too.
. . .
There’s a wonderful new video on Reason.tv called “Living Large.” In it, comedian Drew Carey goes to a lake in California where people are relaxing on $80,000 27-foot boats and goofing around on $25,000 jet skis that they have hitched to their $40,000 SUVs. Mr. Carey asks these boat owners what they do for a living. As it turns out, they aren’t hedge-fund managers. One is a gardener, another a truck driver, another an auto mechanic and another a cop.
. . .
After my lecture, one young woman walked up to me on her way out and huffed: “What I favor is a radical redistribution of wealth in America.” I tried to tell her that America’s greatness is a result of our focus on creating wealth, not redistributing it. But it was too late — she was already tuning in to her iPod.

For the full commentary, see:
STEPHEN MOORE. “DE GUSTIBUS; The Bare Necessities: A Generation Tries to Imagine Life Without iPods.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 14, 2008): W11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
The video is:
Carey, Drew. “Living Large: The Middle Class.” reason.tv Posted February 8, 2008.

McCraw on Schumpeter

Source of book image: http://reader2.com/wasp1028

I am in the process of writing a full-length review of McCraw’s book for the annual Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Suffice it to say that McCraw’s book is very useful and very interesting, and gets a lot right that is important. Most notably, McCraw appreciates that Schumpeter’s central message is that innovation is what matters most about capitalism.

Source of book:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.