J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 21)

p.356

“It seemed plain to Schumpeter that continuous technical innovation and organizational remodeling, not monopolistic profits, accounted for the prosperity of most great companies. “These units,” he says in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, “not only arise in the process of creative destruction and function in a way entirely different from the static schema” but often actually make their own markets: “They largely create what they exploit.” Monopoly profits might flow for a while, but only briefly, in the form of big but single-pay-off “prizes offered by capitalist society to the successful innovator.” Pushing his analysis to its limits, Schumpeter identifies capitalist entrepreneurship with technological progress itself. As a matter of historical record, they were “essentially one and the same thing,” the first being “the “propelling force” of the second.

Schumpeter ends this part of his discussion of capitalism with a remarkable statement that foreshadows the ironic style he uses later in the book:

[Schumpeter:] I am not going to sum up as the reader presumably expects me to. That is to say, I am not going to invite him, before he decides to put his trust in an untried alternative advocated by untried men, to look once more at the impressive economic and the still more impressive cultural achievement of the capitalist order and at the immense promise held out by both. I am not going to argue that that achievement and that promise are in themselves sufficient to support an argument for allowing the capitalist process to work on and, as it might easily be put, to lift poverty from the shoulders of mankind… I am not going to argue, that on the strength of that performance, that the capitalist intermezzo is going to be prolonged. In fact, I am now going to draw the exactly opposite inference.

He next lays the foundations for his much-quoted argument that capitalism has developed the seeds of its own destruction –not for economic reasons but for social ones. To show how this happened, he forthrightly traces the evolution of capitalism from its origins down to the present.”