Quod Me Nutrit . . .

The other day (actually, it was today), a friend asked me about Joseph Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction. Here's what I told him:

Creative destruction is the term for what happens when economic & technological progress renders some workers (or ways of producing) outdated. These relics of a bygone economy meet the fate of textile-mill seamstresses, stagecoach drivers, manufacturing workers in the US and chimney sweeps. People who bred the leeches that doctors used to "treat" patients. Portrait painters in the era before photography. People who used to craft--painstakingly, one-at-a-time--things now mass-produced by machines.

It's called creative destruction because the net result is a good thing: economic progress, which benefits everyone, even though there are short-term losers. Without creative destruction, we'd all still be living in caves and working on our own subsistence farms.

It's sort of like when a musician gets trumped by an even better musician. The new hotshot attracts attention and market share from the first guy, who soon finds himself out of a job. Society is better off with the more skilled musician on the scene, with his more pleasing music, but the mediocre musician who was there "first" will resist the change and denounce it.