Business Cycles Joseph A. Schumpeter 1st Edition Economics 1939 Rare Keynes

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Business Cycles Joseph A. Schumpeter 1st Edition Economics 1939 Rare Keynes:
$3250.00

\"Business Cycles\" by Joseph A. Schumpeter. Published in 1939 by McGraw-Hill Book Company in New York. Two volumes. Both volumes are first edition, first printings, with \"FIRST EDITION\" stated on the title page of each volume. Volume 1 is 448 pages long, Volume 2 continues to page 1095. The books are bound in maroon cloth, with gilt lettering to the spine. The books measure approximately 9.25\" x 6.5\".
The books are in very good minus condition. Moderate wear and rubbing to the cloth boards, with the corners rubbed through to the cardboard. Moderate to heavy underlining and notations in pen and ink in volume 1. The second volume only has a few instances of underlining and notations. The rear pastedowns of both volumes have some staining as shown in the photographs provided.
Schumpeter is important because he developed a theory of business cycles which puts its emphasis on industrial innovations rather than banking. Most business cycle theories put their emphasis the other way, and are essentially monetary. Maynard Keynes is just as much a monetary economist as Milton Friedman when he comes to his explanation of business cycles. This is surely an argument which is going to be reopened.
Schumpeter starts his account of business cycles at the top rather than the bottom of the cycle. “These booms consist in the carrying out of innovations in the industrial and commercial organisms. By innovations I understand such changes in the combinations of the factors of production as cannot be effected by infinitesimal steps or variations on the margin. They consist primarily in changes of methods of production and transportation, or in changes of industrial organisation, or in the production of a new article, or in the opening up of new markets or of new sources of material. The recurring periods of prosperity of the cyclical movements are the form progress takes in a capitalist society.”
He goes on to argue from economic history – and this part of the Schumpeter argument would be difficult to question. “The reader needs only to make the experiment. If he comes to survey industrial history from, say, 1760 onwards, he will discover two things; he will find that very many booms are unmistakably characterised by revolutionary changes in some branch of industry which, in consequence, leads the boom, railways, for instance in the forties, or steel in the eighties, or electricity in the nineties…”
His conclusion is stated very clearly: “booms and consequently depressions are not the work of banks: their cause is a non-monetary one and entrepreneurs demand is the initialing cause even of so much of the cycle as can be said to be added by the act of banks.”
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Inventory #(G4-31)