Joseph Alois Schumpeter is best known for his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the theory of creative destruction, and for the first mention of methodological individualism in economics in German and English.
Schumpeter was finance minister in the Austrian government, president of a private bank and professor before being forced to emigrate due to the rise of the Nazi Party.
An economist coined the term “creative destruction” to describe how the old is constantly being replaced by the new.
Schumpeter also introduced the concept of entrepreneurship.
Initially Schumpeter’s work was eclipsed by the conflicting theories of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but now it has become a centerpiece of modern thinking about how the economy develops.