Schumpeter: Taking flight

摘要

There is something about business that prevents most people from seeing straight. The rise of modern business provoked relentless criticism. Anthony Trollope featured a fraudulent railway company in "The Way We Live Now" (1875). Upton Sinclair dwelt on "the inferno of exploitation" in Chicago's meat packing industry in "The Jungle" (1906). Muckraking journalists denounced the titans of American business as "robber barons".rnA striking number of business people accepted this hostile assessment. Friedrich Engels used some of the profits of his successful textile business to support Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed gravedigger of capitalism. Henry Frick's last message to his fellow steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, was "Tell him I'll see him in hell, where we both are going." Many of the greatest business people threw themselves into philanthropy to try to win back the souls that they had lost in making money. Anti-business sentiment is still widespread today. For many environmentalists, business is responsible for despoiling the planet. For many apostles of corporate social responsibility, business people are fallen angels who can only redeem themselves by doing good works.