Like all major industrial advances, the telecomputer is an instrument of creative destruction. All the likely victims are mobilizing to prevent their own destruction. It is unsure how soon the creators will win.

There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ – the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by more efficient new skills, trades and entire industries – is now apt to span years, often very few years, rather than generations.

If creative destruction allows fast economic growth without generating serious inflation, then it might make sense, for example, to put high values on the shares of companies that will do well in such an unusual environment.

Creative destruction, the term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe the workings of innovation and technology, justly became a buzzword of the New Economy. Many new companies have been created; almost as many will be destroyed.

New-media thinkers, with their appetite for disintermediation and creative destruction, implicitly endorse and advance this transformation.

More than the much-remarked squeeze on working-class jobs in areas of the economy such as manufacturing, [Edward] Luttwak saw an accelerated “creative destruction” affecting clerical jobs in white-collar data-heavy industries such as banking that were being disrupted by capital's “Schumpeteresque” technology-assisted modernisation as they were digitised.

Creative destruction

Meaning

Noun