Schumpeter's conclusion produced a major economic contribution: the belief that capitalism, which evolves from the values of the civilization itself, was losing its steam. Even though his prediction emphasizes a moribund state of the economy, the author appends a small hope that there are still three decades in which capitalism will struggle before dying out completely.
A more complete economic vision appears in Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), in which the author mounts an offensive thrust against his arch-enemy, Karl Marx. Departing from his predecessor's obsession with the antagonism between capitalist and worker, Schumpeter fastens onto the bourgeois nature of the capitalist. Crucial to his denouncement of the wearer of the lounging suit is the author's depiction of plausible capitalism, which describes capitalism as an economic success but a sociological failure. The system bogs down in a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape, where entrepreneurial input counts for little. Yet, even though Schumpeter's scenario plays well on the surface, it is riddled by the disease of rationalism, which gobbles up its own reason for being.
Schumpeter, from the vantage point of his cleverly constructed soapbox, appears to defeat Marx at his own game. The whole breastwork of logic carries some measure of significance in that it predicts the bureaucratization of business and government as well as the ebb and ultimate foundering of the middle-class ideal. Still, the fabric of his logic is weakened in fiber. The mood of Western capitalism did indeed follow his predicted trends through the 1960s. However, it has not resigned itself to the benign socialism he envisioned.
The overwhelming weakness of "the world according to Schumpeter" is that the prognosis is more social and political than economic. In guessing which way the tide of history will direct itself, he lends credence to a belief in a noncapitalist elite, who will form the dynamic core of an otherwise inert society. Unlike Marx's paradigm, which centralizes a disgruntled proletariat in the heart of change, Schumpeter's model places a changing cast of creative movers and shakers at the lead position of capitalistic innovation.
