Creative Destruction in a Nutshell

From Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution. 

"A good figure from the Nobel Prize Foundation’s Scientific Background to the Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt Nobel. The figure shows that firm exit rates and job destruction rates are positively correlated with growth in labor productivity; creative destruction in a nutshell."

 

Creative Destruction

See Creative Destruction by Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox. Excerpt:

"Joseph Schumpeter
(1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve."

But also see this link which suggests that the idea goes back even before Schumpeter to other scholars: Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter by Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert.

"Abstract

This paper argues that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative."

Related posts:

The Power of Creative Destruction (That is the title of a book co-authored by Philippe Aghion, one of this this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in economics) (2025)

Marginal Revolution has great posts on this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in economics (Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr): This is a prize for economic growth & creative destruction (2025)