Joseph Schumpeter was born on 8 February 1883. An economist, his enduring idea was that capitalism is growth and growth needs innovation; the entrepreneur + creative destruction = a system which thrives upon itself.
He was overshadowed by Keynes during his life but his work endures. Unlike most capitalists, he was a student of Marx. Unlike Marx, he saw capitalism failing under the weight of its own success. It, he thought, would produce the routinisation and depersonalisation of corporatism, the death of the image of the heroic entrepreneur, and the creation of a hostile intellectual class.
Two out of three ain’t bad. He was also famous for the line usually recalled as “Early in life I had three ambitions. I wanted to be the greatest economist in the world, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the best lover in Vienna. Well, I never became the greatest horseman in Austria.”