"The Vanishing of Investment Opportunity" - Schumpeter

From Amazon

“The present generation of economists has witnessed not only a world-wide depression of unusual severity and duration but also a subsequent period of halting and unsatisfactory recovery. 

"I have already submitted my own interpretation of these phenomena and stated the reasons why I do not think that they necessarily indicate a break in the trend of capitalist evolution.

"But it is natural that many if not most of my fellow economists should take a different view.

"As a matter of fact they feel, exactly as some of their predecessors felt between 1873 and 1896 - though then this opinion was mainly confined to Europe - that a fundamental change is upon the capitalist process.

"According to this view, we have been witnessing not merely a depression and a bad recovery, accentuated perhaps by anti-capitalist policies, but the symptoms of a permanent loss of vitality which must be expected to go on … .” 

(Page 111 of 407).

This was written in 1942. Les Trente Glorieuses were about to transform the world in a new cycle of robust capitalist growth in the 1950s and 60s. Schumpeter's prescience in opposing doom and gloom was based on his evolutionary idea of capitalist development, leveraging the theory of long cycles first identified by Nikolai Kondratiev.

I shall have more to say next week on this, but here is a preview:

"Now, we are entering a sixth wave led by AI, biotech, robotics, and green energy.

"Our current period of economic slowdown is, therefore, not an anomaly. We are living through the tail end of the fifth long wave, which began with the information and digital revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Its initial explosive productivity has long gone, leaving us mired in the ensuing "Long Stagnation".

"But that is about to change."