E-Books →Capital as Will and Imagination Schumpeter's Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle

Japan's experience after World War II offers the clearest possible case study. To understand what happened, this study turns to a neglected aspect of Joseph Schumpeter's theory of economic development: the nexus between money creation by banks, investment, and inflation. Economists and planners in postwar Japan found in Schumpeter's ideas a description of what they saw happening around them. They also put these ideas directly to work. Asian-style high-speed growth, as pioneered in Japan in the 1950s, presents capitalist industrial development in its most intensified form, but in fact the story is a global one. The shadow of credit is debt, and the worldwide debt bubbles of recent times reveal the limits of the twentieth-century growth model.