Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction

[quantropy]

Why I looked at this book

Creative destruction seems to me to be a very important concept in economics. To move forward we have to dismantle some of the existing productive capacity, and this might seem like a negative step. How can this be reconciled? Do there need to be mechanisms to ensure that the coming of new technology doesn't create hardship elsewhere, or is this an inevitable face of progress? Hence I've been looking for works on the subject. The standard one is Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, but there's only 6 pages about creative destruction in a book of thoroughly unpersuasive praise of Stalinism (which I understand he later greatly regretted), so that hardly seems like the best introduction to the concept. I'd have thought that a whole book on the topic would have followed those 6 pages, but its surprisingly difficult to find anything. So when I came across this book, I thought I needed to take a look.

[quantropy]

First Impressions

It's a short book, so the sample is fairly short, but it does seem to be going in the direction I was hoping, and brings up a couple of interesting points. Firstly is creative destruction really necessary? Could we have more steady economics progress without a constant worry that the business you work for is going to disappear? Secondly, how far can the analogy with Darwinian evolution be taken before it looks like economics is just trying to ape biology (but I'd point out that Darwin's ideas were based on Malthusian economics). It promises to be an interesting read.