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Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883 – 1950) was an economist and political scientist born in Moravia, then Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic. He popularized the term “creative destruction” in economics.

Born in Moravia, Schumpeter was a brilliant student. He began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under the Austrian capital theorist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, taking his PhD in 1906. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz. In 1911 he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I. In 1919-1920, he served as the Austrian Minister of Finance, with some success, and in 1920-1924, as President of the private Biedermann Bank. That bank, as great part of that regional economy, collapsed in 1924 leaving Schumpeter bankrupt.

From 1925-1932, he held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. With the rise of Nazism in central Europe, he moved to the United States and lectured at Harvard in 1927-1928 and 1930. He would teach there from 1932 until his death in 1950. During his Harvard years he was not generally considered a good classroom teacher, but he acquired a school of loyal followers. His prestige among colleagues was likewise not very high because his views seemed outdated and not in synch with the then-fashionable Keynesianism. This period of his life was characterized by hard work but little recognition of his core ideas.

Although Schumpeter encouraged some young mathematical economists and was even the president of the Econometric Society (1940-41), Schumpeter was not a mathematician but rather an economist and tried instead to integrate sociological understanding into his economic theories. From current thought it has been argued that Schumpeter’s ideas on business cycles and economic development could not be captured in the mathematics of his day – they need the language of non-linear dynamical systems to be partially formalized.

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