政經觀點

英國經濟學人自本週起推出新的商業(business)與管理(management)專欄,以熊彼得(Joseph Schumpeter)命名,該雜誌認為很多人,包括企業界人士誤解,甚至污名化商業,卡內基的商業夥伴Henry Frick臨終時請人託話給卡內基,說:

    “地獄見，我們倆都會下地獄的”

由此可見，世人對商業與資本主義的誤解多深，但熊彼得是人類歷史上少數透視商業與資本主義的大師級人物，美國現任白宮經濟首席顧問（曾任克林頓的經濟部長，哈佛校長）Larry Summers稱呼熊彼得是二十一世紀最重要的經濟學家．經濟學人扼要引述他對商業與資本主義的見解，因而以他的名字當作新專欄的名稱：

Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight. He regarded business people as unsung heroes: men and women who create new enterprises through the sheer force of their wills and imaginations, and, in so doing, are responsible for the most benign development in human history, the spread of mass affluence. “Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings,” he once observed. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.” But Schumpeter knew far too much about the history of business to be a cheerleader. He recognised that business people are often ruthless monomaniacs, obsessed by their dreams of building “private kingdoms” and willing to do anything to crush their rivals.

 

Schumpeter’s ability to see business straight would be reason enough to name our new business column after him. But this ability rested on a broader philosophy of capitalism. He argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress. It gives new businesses a chance to replace old ones, but it also dooms those new businesses to fail unless they can keep on innovating (or find a powerful government patron). In his most famous phrase he likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction"

 

"建設性破壞"（creative destruction）是熊彼得對資本主義最膾炙人口的評論．