creative destruction

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English

Etymology

Calque of German schöpferische Zerstörung, popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter.

Noun

creative destruction (uncountable)

  1. (economics, capitalism) The process of industrial mutation that continually revolutionizes the economic structure from within.
    Synonym: Schumpeter's gale
    • 1990, George F. Gilder, Life After Television, page 37:
      Like all major industrial advances, the telecomputer is an instrument of creative destruction. All the likely victims are mobilizing to prevent their own destruction. It is unsure how soon the creators will win.
    • 1994 April 7, Edward Luttwak, “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future”, in London Review of Books‎, volume 16, number 07, →ISSN:
      There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ – the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by more efficient new skills, trades and entire industries – is now apt to span years, often very few years, rather than generations.
    • 2000 June 10, Sharon Reier, “Half a Century Later, Economist's 'Creative Destruction' Theory Is Apt for the Internet Age”, in The International Herald Tribune‎, →ISSN:
      If creative destruction allows fast economic growth without generating serious inflation, then it might make sense, for example, to put high values on the shares of companies that will do well in such an unusual environment.
    • 2001 June 20, Daniel Gross, “Creative Destruction and the Web”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      Creative destruction, the term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe the workings of innovation and technology, justly became a buzzword of the New Economy. Many new companies have been created; almost as many will be destroyed.
    • 2014, Astra Taylor, chapter 2, in The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN:
      New-media thinkers, with their appetite for disintermediation and creative destruction, implicitly endorse and advance this transformation.
    • 2020, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, After the Fact?, Repeater, →ISBN:
      More than the much-remarked squeeze on working-class jobs in areas of the economy such as manufacturing, [Edward] Luttwak saw an accelerated “creative destruction” affecting clerical jobs in white-collar data-heavy industries such as banking that were being disrupted by capital's “Schumpeteresque” technology-assisted modernisation as they were digitised.

See also

Further reading

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