In his new book, 2030, Mauro Guilllén explains how today’s biggest trends will collide and reshape the future of everything.

These are his thoughts about one of the most influential thought leaders:

“The Austrian economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter came up with one of the most felicitous metaphors of all time — ‘creative destruction’ — to describe the essence of what we’ve been exploring. He argued that the market economy’s economy’s tendency to incorporate new technologies and their cascading impacts, which then displace older, inefficient ones, is both its corrosive aspect and its strength. ‘The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist machine in motion,’ he wrote in 1942, ‘comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalistic enterprise creates.’ He described this dynamic as ‘the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure [begin italics] from witbin [end itaics], incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.’ He concluded that ‘this process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.’

“Schumpeter thus reminds us that disruption is as normal as it is ubiquitous; it has reshaped human life since the beginning of the agricultural revolution about twelve thousand years ago. While it is not a new phenomenon, it seems to happen more frequently and more quickly as time goes on. It’s a force that transforms not just the economy but every aspect of life, from politics to interpersonal relationships.”

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To learn more about Mauro Guilllén, please click here.

To learn more about Joseph Schumpeter, please click here.