“As a young man, according to a story Joseph Alois Schumpeter liked to tell later in life, he had three major goals. He wanted to be the world’s greatest economist, Austria’s top horseman and Vienna’s greatest lover. Schumpeter then liked to tease his listeners by adding: I achieved two of them; the part about the top horseman didn’t work out, unfortunately. But seen objectively, perhaps Schumpeter’s greatest achievement is the fact that he is admired by liberals and Marxists alike for the incisiveness and complexity of his analysis of industrial capitalism. And no other great economist of the twentieth century comes close to his flamboyant biography. Schumpeter’s dazzling career could have filled numerous ordinary lives and more.”
Excerpt From: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. “Access Rules.”