Creative destruction

The Creative Destruction (also creative destruction) is a term from the macroeconomics, whose core message is: Each economic development (in the sense of not merely quantitative development ) builds on the process of creative destruction or creative. Through a new combination of factors of production, which passes through successfully, old structures are displaced and eventually destroyed. The destruction is so necessary - and not a system error - so that reorganization can take place.

Conceptual history

Analogously, the term appears already in the Communist Manifesto (1848 ) and Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Inscribed is the fact that a new economic order an old displaced, as has capitalism prevailed against the feudal mode of production. Werner Sombart has included the term in this sense, but he was known through the writings of Joseph Schumpeter. There he underwent a change so far that it now stands for the positive economic characteristics of capitalist production, namely the abilities to innovation and technical- economic progress. As a general, not related to economic principle, it has many precursors. For example, writes Friedrich Nietzsche in his Zarathustra:

"And who has to be a creator in good and evil: indeed, which must first be a destroyer, and break values ​​. "

Economic importance according to Schumpeter

The concept of creative destruction is a basic theme of Schumpeter's work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, first published in English in 1942. Introduced it is in the seventh chapter. There he writes:

"The opening up of new markets and the organizational organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly the economic structure from within revolutionized ², incessantly destroying the old one and incessantly creating a new one.

This process of " creative destruction " is the essential fact of capitalism. That is capitalism and it has to live every capitalist structure. "

" Note ² These revolutions are not actually continuous; they occur in erratic bursts, which are separated from each other by voltages relative peace. The process as a whole, however, runs continuously - in the sense that it always is either revolution or absorption of the results of the revolution going on; both together form what is known as the business cycle. "

The idea of creative destruction is already playing in substance in Schumpeter's theory of economic development work involved. Trigger for the creative destruction are innovations that are driven by the entrepreneurs with the aim to prevail on the market.