Business Books

There are two very valuable books here.

These books were first published over 80 years ago. But that does not in any way mean they are less important today than they were when first written. The fact that they have withstood the test of time and are still considered highly valuable works today validates the importance of the message.

The third paragraph of Scientific Advertising gives a preview of the lessons to be learned. "Therefore this book deals, not with theories and opinions, but with well-proved principles and facts. It is written as a text book for students and a safe guide for advertisers." They are both based on well proven facts.

Both books contain very valuable lessons learned by Claude Hopkins during his amazing career in advertising. He gives a very solid philosophy of advertising and then backs it with many actual examples of advertising in action.

If your business conducts any form of advertising, you would do well to read these two books. As Hopkins points out, "The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself."

A recurring theme of both books is all advertising must have a means to measure the results. "In no other way can real service reveal its advantage. Doing anything blindly is folly."

Most businessmen today believe they know their market. Hopkins has some strong words for those who rely on their opinion rather than testing the market. He says, "Sometimes those who judge the world by themselves, succeeded. Four times in five they failed. I know of nothing more ridiculous than gray-haired boards of directors deciding on what housewives want." "Only the obstinate bone-headed, will venture far on personal opinion."

Claude gives some great lessons in selling. "And every effort to sell creates corresponding resistance." Don't engage in selling. Interest those people who want what you have. Clearly show them the benefits of your product. But don't try to sell them. It will backfire. "Changing people's habits is very expensive." "People will do much to cure a trouble, but in general do little to prevent it." So don't try to sell prevention. Sell the cure.

There is some overlap between the two books. Some examples are cited in both books. But it is very interesting reading, learning how Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice were marketed. There are countless other examples of how appropriate marketing created demand and distribution.

It is easy to say that times have changes and what worked in the early 1900's will not work today. There is no doubt that a lot has changed. But not basic human behavior. So the principles are still the same. Your job is to learn the principles and figure out how to apply them to your product or service.

The two greatest lessons from these books are to measure your return and to get rid of your own opinion about what the customer wants. Learn to ask them. Find out what they want. Trying to sell what you think the market wants can be very costly.

Delightful and easy to read. Full of knowledge you can put to use in your business right away.

This is the seed book on advertising and copywriting.

It's a short book. The ideas in it are so tersely stated
it's easy to miss their profundity.

Very concise. Very well illustrated by examples from
Hopkins' advertising career. The incidents described
occurred in a different time though - so they might
at first inapplicable to today's marketing environment.

Housewives no longer become excited by canned Baked Beans
and mail-order corsetry. When this book was written
products were described with words and a drawing at
best. The demands of the marketplace today are different
and customers have been split-up into almost infinite
niche markets today.

Still, timeless wisdom about what gets people to buy.

I have read marketing books by several of the most famous marketers who are still alive and this book is much better than all of them. This book lets you really understand marketing in a practical way, whereas other books make marketing seem more difficult, confusing, theoretical, and vague. Other books are much less helpful than this one. I think Claude had many times more experience and major successes than any living marketer. I think he knew what he was talking about much more than any others. That's why he explains things much better. I think he was also much smarter and talented as well. He was truly a marketing genius. It doesn't matter that this book is old, because people haven't changed and the scientific principles underlying marketing have not changed at all. If it is true that few people read this book, then I am glad! I would be afraid if all my competition read this book!

If you are going to be successful in direct marketing you need to the buy this book and read it until you can quote from it. Study this book and it will pay off.

Hopkins's career began at the dawn of advertising and copywriting. As his career progressed so did advertising and he gives us a behind the scenes look at many advertising campaigns from the late 1800's-1920's. Hopkins almost single-handedly helped take copywriting out of its "swaddling clothes."

Of equal interest is his personal history. He was raised in a strict religious home and expected to become a minister. But at age 17 he delivered a sermon that revealed his true beliefs, which were more liberal than his mother's, and he said it was the defining moment of his life. Not once, however, does he criticize his parents or his upbringing and he credits his mother for his advertising and copywriting skills.

Hopkins launched his career in Grand Rapids, Michigan and eventually moved to Chicago, and other cities, for bigger and better jobs. Yet he says that he wondered if remaining in Grand Rapids and living a quiet life wouldn't have been the better choice. He remained connected to normal, real people even after becoming affluent and said he learned much about contentment from them. Hopkins's attitude is very different from most authors of modern business and personal finance books, where it's all about the money.

Scientific Advertising is, as you already know, must reading for advertisers and copywriters. The chapters are short and address very specific topics: headlines, letters, individuality, telling a full story, and, my favorite, service. "The good salesman does not merely cry a name...He pictures the customer's side of his service until the natural result is to buy."

In this book you will not only learn about advertising but you will encounter a humble man who remained detached from the trappings that advertising can sometimes present.

USEFUL FOR AN INEXPERIENCED INVESTOR. PRIMARY POINT IS TO FOCUS ON THE LONG TERM AND DO NOT RESPOND TO DAY TO DAY EVENTS COVERED IN THE MEDIA. SOME USEFUL INFORMATION ON WHICH STOCKS TO BUY AND WHEN. GOOD BUYS ARE FREQUENTLY NOT THE "BEST" STOCKS BUT RATHER THE ONES GETTTING THE LEAST ATTENTION FROM ANALYSTS AND THE MEDIA.

Another great book from Bernstein. This one is more accessible than Style Investing and has some great financial planning tips/exercises. After the last 2 years in the markets many investors should reasses their tolerance and goals and Bernstein gives a nice framework to do that within.

This is an outstanding book---the best I've read in 3 years. I particularly like the discussion of risk--how the general perception of risk differs form the investors point of view. And how the investor's perception of risk can be misinterpreted by the broker or financial consultant. A great discussion of value verses growth stocks and which do better under which circumstances. I learned alot by reading this book.

This is the best book I've read in several years. It is thought provoking and backed up by data to show which stocks do well and poorly over time. Alot of the information is counter-intuitive--i.e. shows how your gut instinct is often incorrect. I particularly like the book's discussion of risk, and how the conventional view of risk differs considerably for the average investors view of risk. I plan to reread this book soon.

This readable book explains very important concepts (risk/reward, asset allocation etc.) very well. Serious long-term investors would be well advised to navigate the noise (I would suggest shutting off CNBC as a start), read Richard's book, and then create a diversified portfolio that is expected to help them fund their long-term liabilities (education, retirement etc.) while matching their true risk tolerance.

This book addresses every aspect of doing business on the Internet securely. A must read for anyone that uses the Internet to either buy or sell.

This is an excellent book for the skeptic who thinks that "it can't happen to us!" I think many different companies (government and private sector alike) will be amazed at how comparitively little it actually costs to prevent a corporate disaster. Ever wish to go inside the mind of a good hacker and learn how he does it? This is the book for you!

The ubiquitous Internet is a double-edged sword. A major benefit is sharing information; a major detriment is the risk to customers of divulging private information. For e-businesses, therefore, privacy is a showstopper issue. This book was written to promote e-business success by helping organizations evaluate privacy needs, establish a privacy task force, use technologies to provide maximum protection, formulate privacy policies and procedures, implement and test privacy procedures, and monitor and modify privacy protection. This one's a winner--for companies that want to "win" at e-business.

The ubiquitous nature of the Internet is a double-edged sword, with sharing information a major benefit, and the risk of divulging private information a major detriment. In the rush to establish an e-business, organizations can't afford to ignore the showstopper issue: privacy. Erbschloe and Vacca provide a how-to for businesses to help them evaluate their privacy needs, establish a privacy task force, use privacy technologies to the best advantage, formulate privacy policies and procedures, implement and test privacy procedures, and monitor and modify their privacy protection. This one's a winner--for businesses that want to "win" at e-business.

A very informative and useful book in an area which is near and dear to all of us as we open up to the world of i-payments.

Pamela Yatsko's New Shanghai is one of those "must read" books about China. Yatsko did much of the research for this book while living and working in China. She lived in Shanghai from 1995 to 1998, while serving as the Eastern Economic Review's first Shanghai correspondent and bureau chief since 1949. Following this assignment, she worked for the Economist Group as managing editor of Hong Kong's Business China--a job which allowed her to return to Shanghai frequently.

Yatsko's experiences writing about China's economy led her to explore the many facades she discovered pervading contemporary China. According to the author, while the exteriors of many facets of Shanghai look glitzy and modern, the interiors often tell a vastly different story. The book is divided into key aspects of the city's revival: real estate, the budding world of high finance, growing socio-economic disparity, the return of the multinational firms and their expats, vice, the future of state-owned businesses and their employees, and the status of the arts.

Summarizing Yatsko's conclusions would spoil a juicy read. So, suffice it to say that she uncovers the ways in which expectations for the city have often not been realistic and means by which the future lies in the ability of reality to catch up with these expectations. Considering the industrial and cultural wasteland the city became between 1949 and 1979, Shanghai truly has undergone an amazing renaissance. Will it become the New York City of Asia? Should it? The author gives us pause for many such thoughts. I lived in Shanghai from 2005-2007, and this book clarified many aspects of the "new China" for me.

The book is well-researched and sheds insights on both the city's achievements and her challenges for the future. All of the key elements making up this brave new city are helpfully placed within their historical context. New Shanghai makes essential reading for anyone who seeks to put modern Shanghai life into perspective.

Fun Fact: On the inside book jacket, you'll find a review by one of Shanghai's own literary celebrities, Lynn (Ling) Pan. She was also interviewed by the author for this book.

As a Shanghainese who is sick of the feverish optimism about China nowadays, I was deeply skeptical when I first opened this book. It turned out to be the best book on China I have seen so far. The book, especially its second chapter on the financial market, is full of coolheaded analysis and down-to-the-ground reliable facts. Sometimes, it even shames me for not knowing Shanghai as well as this foreigner does. I recommend the book as a very reliable source of information for those interested in Shanghai and as a book to keep some authentic memory of Shanghai for those overseas Shanghaineses.

Yatko's book far exceeded my expectations. Well argued, carefully thought out and with an excellent thesis. It is easy for old Shanghai residents (such as myself) to revel in an Old Shanghai nostalgia that has long ceased to exist. Yatsko highlights and illustrates many points that we overlooked, ignored or never knew in the first place. Valuable reading for anyone planning to do business in China or simply interested in this great city.

I worked in business in Shanghai during 1995-98 and continue to travel there often. I have yet to come across a more interesting or useful book about Shanghai's metamorphosis and the changes taking place in urban China in general. Although Shanghai and China are fast moving targets, the book provides a spot-on snapshot of the issues facing Shanghai at the millennium and has helped me make sense of this fascinating yet perplexing city. The author really captures the successes and failures of fin de siecle Shanghai well. Also, there's lots of anecdote to make the book a lively read-the chapter on vice is particularly fun. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in understanding what's beneath Shanghai's glittering surface.

I found "New Shanghai" not long ago as I was preparing to visit Shanghai after six years in the states, and was attracted to it immediately. Having lived in Shanghai most of my life, I have to say that the author knows about Shanghai better than I do. I'm only familiar with the life of my like, but the book has a broad coverage, from the upper class to the cultural underdogs. In particular, I liked to read Yatsko's interviews with various people, which added a sense of reality.

Yatsko has captured Shanghai's fastest socio-economic changes since it lost the luster as the most prosperous city in the Far East early last century. With her solid knowledge of economics and first-hand experience, the stories are credible and the analysis is insightful. Whereas "old Shanghai" has aroused most scholarly interest due to its relation to modernity, Yatsko's depiction of Shanghai's rebirth in the 1990s also offers a unique hindsight on its past.

Although I wish I could have read this wonderful book earlier, it's not so late in the sense that I now know more interesting places

I love Gordon Korman's books. They are clean, fun and thrillingly funny. This, however is one of my favorites. I especially recommend it for all my neices and nephews who are just getting into reading. I still read it about once every year or so. Trust me and buy the thing, you won't regret it

Gordon Korman has delivered to us an astounding amount of unforgettable books which I will reread forever, I Want to Go Home!, Who is Bugs Potter?, and the Bruno and Boots series really do stick in your mind after you read them, they are classics. However, No Coins, Please, falls of short of the line I've expected him to meet. First of all, the counsellors are unbearable dull. Even though we spend much more time with them than with the counsellors in "I Want to Go Home!" they are much more boring and predictable than even the minor counsellors in "I Want to Go Home!". Similarly, the other children just aren't as interesting or noteworthy. The humour isn't really there, and as for the schemes, well, the extra prank Korman put on his website as a joke is more noteworthy.

So what's my point? If you want to read a great Korman book, get a MacDonald Hall book, I Want to Go Home, or Who is Bugs Potter?, and leave this one until you don't have any left.

I first read this book years ago when I was a kid and totally fell in love with it. I remember having to take care not to read it in public because I kept laughing too loudly! I have since read it many times and still enjoy it just as much, even as an adult. Gordon Korman creates a world and characters so real that you wish his books were ten times as long.

The story is about Artie Geller an 11 year with a very special talent - he is the world's best entrepreneur. He joins five other 11 year olds and tour counsellors Rob and Dennis on a road trip from Canada to Los Angeles. Along the way he comes up with numerous highly successful (and highly hilarious) money making schemes and before long has his whole tour bus (the "Ambulance") is involved. The characters are so likeable and the adventures so much fun, you'll wish there really was a "juniortours" and that you could go along on the ride!

In my honest opinion Gordon Korman's "No Coins, Please", "I want to Go Home", "Don't Care High", "Semester in the life of a Garbage Bag" and the two "Bugs Potter" books are MUST reads for anyone (young or old, boy or girl) who loves a good laugh and a book you can't put down. The Bruno and Boots series are also definitely worth a read if you can get hold of them.

I highly recommend "No Coins, Please" - you will not regret buying it!

This book was a favorite of mine while growing up. I first read it in grade school and continued to read through middle school and high school. It's one of the childhood books I've kept as an adult!

The "Ambulance" gang is great -- going from city to city ... a summer camp on wheels! Artie, the main character, is a true shyster, but you absolutely love him.

As a kid, I was intrigued by and a bit envious of the Canadian kid who could sell people attack jelly, open a club called the "Pretzel" in Denver and still manage to elude the FBI.

Get a copy of this book -- you won't be disappointed!

I first read this book years ago when I was a kid and totally fell in love with it. I remember having to take care not to read it in public because I kept laughing too loudly! I have since read it many times and still enjoy it just as much, even as an adult. Gordon Korman creates a world and characters so real that you wish his books were ten times as long.

The story is about Artie Geller an 11 year with a very special talent - he is the world's best entrepreneur. He joins five other 11 year olds and tour counsellors Rob and Dennis on a road trip from Canada to Los Angeles. Along the way he comes up with numerous highly successful (and highly hilarious) money making schemes and before long has his whole tour bus (the "Ambulance") involved. The characters are so likeable and the adventures so much fun, you'll wish there really was a "juniortours" and that you could go along on the ride!

In my honest opinion Gordon Korman's "No Coins, Please", "I want to Go Home", "Don't Care High", "Semester in the life of a Garbage Bag" and the two "Bugs Potter" books are MUST reads for anyone (young or old, boy or girl) who loves a good laugh and a book you can't put down. The Bruno and Boots series are also definitely worth a read if you can get hold of them.

I highly recommend "No Coins, Please" - you will not regret buying it!

If you or a woman you know needs to understand how to move forward through the dynamics of change and career, Now What Do I Do is the right place to start.

I recommend Chapter 10, devoted to working for yourself and starting your own business, to my interior redesign students. Good business basics and ideas, worthy of frequent review.

Too often the older woman is passed over in the competitive workforce or senses age discrimination. This upbeat, positive book helps that woman oversome self-made issues and attitudes of others that may be out there working against her goal of self-staining or career enhancing employment. Written in an easy-to-read style, this book makes the experience positive by giving guidelines, exercises, and wonderful recommendations. We all need our own thirty-second commercial.

This book is primarily written for the women who are experiencing mid-life choices.
The author leads the reader through many self-evaluation lists on how you are doing at mid-life and what direction you want to go in the next phase of your life. There are self-assessments that help you decide if you prefer a job, start a business, go back to school or become a volunteer.
Ms. Cannon provides resource lists for finding or creating a support group to help you with your decision. There are also resource lists for company directories, non-traditional jobs, volunteer organizations, non-profit groups, as well as a section on how to start your own business.
"What Do I Do Now?" is a well-written, thoughtful, informative book full of ideas and information that can guide women, who are looking for a change, in their life the direction they need to go. Dr. Cannon's book is a must read for all women.

Reviewed by Tammy Petty Conrad for Reader Views (10/06)

Today we look at employment differently than our parents did. We change jobs more often and know we'll work longer before retirement. Jan Cannon, president of her own career counseling firm, smashes the concept that career changes must be made prior to mid-life. In fact she helps her readers embrace changes after forty, and even fifty. She focuses on women of this age group because this population has been previously ignored by career planners. "Now What Do I Do?" is for people considering changing jobs or those who have to. It is even helpful to those who want to start their own business or just want to do volunteer work. "The right job...is one that meets psychological, emotional, and financial needs as much as one that uses your skills."

The author goes through the mechanics required in searching for work, but also helps readers get to know themselves, their skills and their preferences. The book reads quickly, but it is also a workbook full of assessments which allow the reader to ponder their attributes and desires so they don't settle for the first available job, but instead find where they are meant to be. Rather than being too late to realize our dreams, "Mid-life is a time for exploration and self-expression, not resignation." Being closer to mid-life than my twenties, I find this very reassuring!

I especially liked the "Exploring the Want Ads" exercise. Previously I only circled the jobs I knew I could get. But the author suggests circling anything that interests you, whether you are qualified or not, because you're not looking for a specific job in this case, but what interests you, and therefore motivates you. This exercise includes other steps to make it as valuable as possible.

Jan Cannon suggests many types of support tools, one of which is your own "Success Team." This is a group of people you select who will support you during your job search. We have support groups for everything else, why not job hunting? Lastly the resource section overflows with websites, books and associations to benefit your search.

Even if you don't think you want a change, read "Now What Do I Do?" It will give you the confidence to step out of the box. After all, there's plenty of time left.

"Now What Do I Do?" is an easy to read guide for those looking for a fresh start. The book's primary audience is middle-aged women who have decided to reenter the workforce or to take a new direction in their careers. It walks the reader through many hands-on exercises, all the options for work (working for someone, working for yourself, or volunteering), and is sensitive about the subject of how to manage ageism (age discrimination).

While I am not part of the book's intended audience, I, as a young woman, found the book very useful. It is rich in advice, resources, and thorough exercises that would help anyone uncover her skills, interests, and passions. The handful of comments about age were the only few points in the book that I did not find immediately relevant.

Several of the exercises (e.g., writing a future autobiography) and ideas (e.g., importance of networking, thinking positively, creating a support group for change) were not new in that I've come across them in other books, but this is advantageous because Cannon compiles a comprehensive set of exercises in one easy to access reference.

The bottom-line of Cannon's book is that we have to do our homework in preparing for a life transition. She hits this point so hard with all her assignments that at times, the book feels a little overwhelming and preachy. It would have been nice if she balanced out some assignments and advice with more stories or alternative approaches. She shares some very inspiring anecdotes about herself, famous people, and her clients, which left me thirsty for more.

I also think the book would flow better had she brought some of her finishing points to the beginning of the book because I found myself "getting sidetracked" already during the initial chapters. However, all the information is there to help one get started, and she who takes full advantage of Cannon's book no doubt will enjoy much success in her new career.

The career coach who has "Now What Do I Do?" on his/her shelf also has a great library of materials to help clients find their direction. Members of women's professional organizations (e.g., Society of Women Engineers) can benefit in particular because they can tap into their membership pool to buddy up with someone or create the much-needed "success team" as they embark in a new direction or into the world of work for the first time in a while.

I highly recommend this book. Before I read this book I was really struggling with the direction I wanted to go in life. Even though I have a master's degree in my profession, I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue in my profession. I've read a few books on career planning and I've taken a few assessment tests. While I found a few gold nuggets here and there, I just didn't have the clarity and assurance I was looking for. I read passion and purpose and it really helped me. Also, I contacted Marlys Hanson and she walked me through each step and helped me understand why I was struggling with my current position and she helped me see what I need to look for in my next position. The money and time I spent reading this book and being counseled by Marlys was one of the best investments I've ever made.

Before I completed the SIMA analysis presented in this book, I was ready to change employers, and even careers. However, I did not know what I wanted. The SIMA model is an excellent tool because it helps you identify how you are motivated to work, what you are motivated to work with, and what kind of results you are motivated to achieve. All of this is based on a careful analysis of your lifetime accomplishments - thus, your motivations are based on evidence from what you've actually done, not what you *think* you're interested in (e.g., if given multiple choice answers in the standard personality test).

I went through the book myself first and then contacted Marlys to help me "fill-in-the blanks". Marlys was very prompt in responding and turned around a full assessment within one week. The result is that I now understand why I didn't enjoy my previous jobs, and most importantly, I know what I need in my current job to derive satisfaction and enjoyment from my work. Now, I can clearly articulate my career and life goals because I know what my strengths are, and I will build upon them to achieve the greatest success. I look forward to being much happier and excited about my work as well!

Amazing insight contrary to most popular opinion. The exercise is an investment in time that pays off hundreds of fold. Better yet, the author is more than willing to take the exercise to the next level to really bring it all to life. One of the best investments I've made in years - in time and dollars!

I have spent many years as a psychologist counseling clients who lack a sense of fulfillment and meaning in their lives. I therefore read this book, and underwent the SIMA process, with great interest. I found that it was the most accurate, powerful, and comprehensive instrument that I have encountered to understand one's motivated abilities. I highly recommed this book to anyone serious about reaching their potential doing work that they enjoy.

Are you having a hard time deciding what you want to be when you grow up? Are you 43 and still wondering? Or maybe you're 53 and considering your second career. For those of us who have ever had such thoughts, Marlys Hanson's "Passion and Purpose" is the solution.

In this excellent work you will learn about Motivated Abilities, and why you should work to your strengths more than always trying to improve your weaknesses. You will understand why you are particularly good at some activities, and perhaps a bit less so at others.

After you have read the book, help with understanding your Motivated Abilities is available from Marlys' company, Marlys Hanson and Associates. While the book teaches the method of doing this analysis oneself, the experience of Marlys and her team will help you learn even more about yourself for a modest additional cost.

I wish I had found Marlys sooner, but am thrilled that I found her at all.

Joseph Schumpeter was brilliant, magnetic, cultured, urbane, witty and engaging. He was superbly educated and he taught at the best universities. He was an accomplished scholar and prolific writer, a snappy dresser and bon vivant, elegant, charismatic and handsome. Colleagues revered him, students loved him and women adored him. His ambition: to become the best economist, horseman and lover in the world. He confessed that, sadly, he failed to meet his goal with horses. Schumpeter was one of the world's leading economists while he lived, and has become an iconic figure since his death. John Maynard Keynes is widely considered the doyen of economists. However, Schumpeter's ideas have more impact in our postmillennial era, which some economists have termed the "century of Schumpeter." Scholar Thomas K. McCraw paints a vivid portrait of this remarkable man, his economic theories and his far-reaching influence. getAbstract suggests that being familiar with Schumpeter is pivotal to understanding today's entrepreneurial economy. McCraw's book is a good place to get to know him.

I thoroughly enjoyed Prophet of Innovation as biography. I think it is the best biography I've read in twenty years.

I am not an economist, but I was first exposed to the ideas of Schumpeter in my one year general ed Economics course. This course was taught by one of only two conservative instructors in my whole college education and he was influenced by Schumpeter. (I did take economics in high school which was taught from the Keynesian model.)

That was in 1968, the year the New Deal-Cold War Liberal Democratic Party coalition was itself undergoing creative destruction. Of course, that year, the Vietnam War and the protests were the central focus. But, the Schumpeter seed had been planted in my mind and I began to see the relationships.

My Father, foolishly, as he admitted to me much later, had gotten his old job back after he left the army post World War II. He was entitled to it under the Selective Service Act of 1940. He thought he would be secure as rural passenger train depot agent. But, the railroad passenger service was about to get a creative destruction death blow. In 1954, the Boeing 707 made its maiden flight. In 1958, the Boeing 707 made its first flight for Pan Am. In 1959, he was out of a job. He was a member in good standing of the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, AFL-CIO, but that didn't matter. If you had no customers, then no business, no jobs, and no union. When the business traveler ditched the trains for the planes, that was the end of the railroad passenger service along with 110 jobs per train. (He floundered around for awhile and took a few community college classes and got a better job afterwards.)

Later, I encountered Schumpeter again in political sociology, one of my areas of study in graduate school. As the author notes, Schumpeter attacks Marx on the static nature of his theories of class structure.

For me, McCraw makes two very impressive points about Schumpeter the teacher and scholar. As Teacher, McCraw quotes his student, Paul Sweezy writing that Schumpeter never judged students and colleagues on their agreement with his views. Sweezy called it "the rarest of all qualities in a teacher." I would say its even rarer today.

As a scholar, he mostly stayed out of policy advocacy. He did not seek to found a Schumpeterian school. Many of his best students were Keynesians. It takes a great deal of courage, character, and humility to forego such ego feeding ventures. Perhaps his experience as Finance Minister in the rump Austrian socialist government post World War I cured him.

On a more somber note, it is really staggering the amount of personal tragedy this man suffered in his life. He lost his father at age four. World War I destroyed his country. He lost his mother, wife, and son all within one month. He lost one of his best graduate students at the University of Bonn, Clare Tisch, to the holocaust. He also lost his companion, driver, and caretaker, Mia Stockel to the holocaust along with her husband and sister. His third wife Elizabeth, who had rescued him from deep depression, got breast cancer in the last year of his life.

McCraw does a fine job of weaving Schumpeter's life and writings together into a great biography of Joseph Schumpeter and history of the first half of the Twentieth Century

I thought this to be a very dynamic book that is loaded with ideas that spring from an intellect that is honest. This is a quality that is all too rare in our times. His thought process as described by McCraw seems to me to be the envy of anyone that strives to get to the bottom or truth of something. Schumpeter is brutally honest with himself and that also is a very rare thing indeed! I'm not sure just what "truth" is but think he has come as close to it as any man can.


Brad Angell

This is a solid biography of the brilliant economist Joseph Schumpeter. A first rate biography should present the life, times, and significance of its subject clearly. McCraw is excellent on the life, but only good on the times and significance. Schumpeter is a very interesting figure. He had a varied and sometimes turbulent personal life. He is clearly one of the most important figures in 20th century economics. His great theme, the functioning of capitalist economies, is a central issue. With the return of a high degree of globalization over the 3 decades and the great dynamism of the business world, Schumpeter's emphasis on entrepeunership and business innovation is increasingly salient. McCraw draws on an extensive repository of Schumpeter's personal papers to produce an excellent reconstruction of Schumpeter's personal life and career. His discussions of Schumpeter's major works are very good. This book is generally written well. Schumpeter emerges as a complex but impressive and largely sympathetic figure. McCraw shows Schumpeter to be an interesting combination of brilliant intellectual and public showman. This had considerable benefits. Schumpeter was distinguished not only by his considerable scholarly contributions but also by his impressive teaching. He was apparently a brilliant lecturer and superb mentor. A remarkable fraction of the leading figures of post-WWI American economics were his former students. McCraw also does a nice job of portraying the important role of Schumpeter's third wife, the impressive Elizabeth Boody, who was a substantial economic scholar in her own right and who completed Schumpeter's last great, and posthumously published, book.

McGraw's account has, however, some limitations. Schumpeter was esssentially a career academic who lived a very intellectual life. While McCraw does well in discussing Schumpeter's work, he is not nearly as good on the intellectual background and other trends in economic thought. By the end of WWII, Schumpeter's work was being eclipsed by Keynesian economics. McCraw discusses this but not in enough detail to get a really good idea of the major issues. I get the sense that this was not just a question of Schumpeter versus Keynes but also that the direction of economics towards what is now macroeconomics was something that left Schumpeter somewhat isolated. Schumpeter himself may have inadvertantly encouraged this tendency. He was an advocate of the mathematization of economics, despite his own relatively non-mathematical work. But since the type of discontinuous phenomena in which he was most interested resisted mathematization, mathematical analysis developed to analyze more continuous phenomena in what I think became macroeconomics.

I'm not sure that McCraw does well on other dimensions of Schumpeter's historical background. McGraw describes Schumpeter's work in terms that suggest clearly an analogy with evolutionary processes (analogies which McGraw uses at times). The pre-WWI central Europe of Schumpeter's youth was the great period of social Darwinism. Did this have an influence? Similarly, Schumpeter's rather romantic, almost Nietzschean view of entrepeuners also seems to fit in with the intellectual life of the Fin de Siecle Europe of his youth. I'm surprised also that McGraw doesn't make much of the connection between the Austrian Empire's relative backwardness and the drift towards protectionism in the pre-WWI years. Surely these had some influence, especially given Schumpeter's interest in the dynamism of capitalism.

While McGraw is generally sympathetic to Schumpeter, he is hardly uncritical. He makes the good point that Schumpeter never really understood American democracy. At times, however, McGraw may be a bit too generous. Schumpeter's criticism of the German Social Democrats as preparing the way for an authoritarian society was unfair to the only consistently pro-democratic force in Germany. McGraw is also periodically inaccurate about general background. The signers of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, for example, would have been surprised to learn that the combat of WWI had little effect of national borders.

Moravian-born, Vienna-educated Professor Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who liked to say of his aspirations to be the world's greatest economist, horseman, and lover that only the second had given him problems, was a study in contrasts. He relished his fame as one of the interwar years' premier economic theorists yet modestly declined to mention his work in his Harvard classes or in his exhaustive book on the history of economic thought. (Citations to his work were inserted into that book by his wife after his death). An obsessively hard working, morose (indeed often depressed) writer in private, he affected a public image of carefree, cheerful ebullience. A notoriously easy grader to his students, he often gave himself low marks in his diary. A one-time banker, he relied upon the women in his life to balance his checkbook. He chronicled the evolution of the auto industry but never learned to drive. He admired mathematics but failed to employ them in his work. A harsh critic of the static, steady-state equilibrium thinking of the neoclassical marginal utility/marginal productivity school, he nevertheless declared one of its founders, the French neoclassical equilibrium theorist Leon Walras, the greatest economist of all time.

All his life Schumpeter championed capitalism yet was an expert on Marx, Marxist economics, and the entire socialist literature. A Marxist economist, Paul Sweezy, was among his closest Harvard friends. Schumpeter was a political conservative and anti-socialist who,notwithstanding, served as Finance Minister for a socialist government in post-World War I Austria. He lauded capitalism's superior performance while predicting the system's death from too much success. He preached creative destruction -- the incessant tearing down of old ways of doing things by the new -- as capitalism's inescapable iron law, yet was unprepared when his own work fell prey to it.

The 1990s saw the publication of at least three biographies of this complex, paradoxical figure. Now comes Thomas McCraw's definitive and elegantly written study to top them all. Drawing upon Schumpeter's diary, correspondence, early drafts, and published works, McCraw, a Pulitzer Prize winning emeritus professor of Business History at Harvard, paints a vivid picture of Schumpeter's life and times, his loves and achievements. Readers will choose their favorite parts of the book. Most enlightening to this reviewer is McCraw's survey of Schumpeter's scholarly contributions. Ironically, McCraw writes that he is "not concerned with Schumpeter's economic thinking, narrowly construed," but with his "life and his compulsive drive to understand capitalism." But that is a false dichotomy because Schumpeter's theories cannot be divorced from his attempts to come to grips with capitalism: each guided and shaped the other. In any case, McCraw provides a perceptive and accurate account of Schumpeter's academic greatest hits and misses.

Greatest Hits
Hits include first and foremost the path breaking and seminal Theory of Economic Development, published in 1911 when Schumpeter, then 28, was in what he called his scholar's "sacred third decade" of peak creativity. Other hits followed including the subtle and provocative Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and the mighty History of Economic Analysis, which Schumpeter worked on throughout the whole decade of the 1940s, and which was edited and published by his third wife, Elizabeth, four years after his death in 1950.

Schumpeter pushed one idea all his life: that capitalism means growth and growth requires innovation. The book that put him on the map, The Theory of Economic Development, states for the first time his vision of capitalism as the economic system that delivers faster growth and higher living standards (especially of the middle and lower income classes) than any other system, albeit in a disruptive, jerky, anxiety-inducing fashion. Like a perpetual motion machine, capitalism generates its own momentum internally without the need of outside force. Even technological change, seen by some as an exogenous propellant, is treated by Schumpeter as a purely endogenous matter, the product of economically motivated human ingenuity.

Breaking from received wisdom, Schumpeter replaces the static equilibrium analysis of his neoclassical marginalist predecessors and contemporaries with a dynamic disequilibrium theory of cyclical growth. His key building blocks are profits, entrepreneurs, bank credit creation, and innovation. Profits (supplemented perhaps with a desire to create a business dynasty) motivate entrepreneurs, who, financed by bank credit, innovate new goods, new technologies, and new methods of management and organization. These innovations fuel growth and generate cycles.

Why cycles? Cycles arise with a backlog of pent-up potential innovations seeking to override the barriers of habit, custom, tradition, and entrenched positions blocking their realization. When the first successful entrepreneur overcomes the stubborn resistance of incumbent interests and eases the path for other entrepreneurs, the resulting bunching of innovations (not to be confused with mere inventions, which Schumpeter saw as occurring more or less continuously) boosts investment spending, which bids prices above costs and raises profit margins thereby triggering the upswing or prosperity phase of the cycle. The high profit margins then attract swarms of imitators and would-be competitors into the innovating industries. Output overexpands relative to the demand for it, prices fall to or below costs thus eliminating profit margins, and the downswing or recession phase begins. The recession continues, weeding out inefficient firms as it goes, until the economy absorbs the innovations and consolidates the attendant gains thus clearing the ground for a fresh burst of innovation.

If the upswing has been accompanied with speculative excesses nonessential to innovation, the downswing may overshoot the new post-innovation equilibrium. Then the cycle enters its depression phase where the excesses are expunged and the economy returns via a recovery phase to equilibrium. Schumpeter stressed that the latter two phases and the phenomena that generate them are unnecessary for cyclical growth and could be prevented by properly designed policy. It's not speculative bubbles but rather the discontinuous clustering of innovations in time plus their diffusion across and assimilation into the economy that produces real cycles of prosperity and recession.

Profits, entrepreneurs, bank credit, innovation - all are essential to the growth of per capita real income in Schumpeter's model. Remove any one and the growth process stops. Innovation, for instance, is abortive in the absence of bank credit creation necessary to effectuate it. Cash-strapped entrepreneurs cannot build their better mouse traps from thin air. They require real resource inputs and loans of newly created bank money to hire them away from alternative employments. In highlighting this observation, Schumpeter effectively abandoned the classical dichotomy notion that loan-created money is a mere sideshow, a neutral veil that together with metallic money determines the nominal, or absolute, price level while leaving real economic variables unaffected. Not so, said Schumpeter.For him, money and credit are integral to the process of real economic growth and so have real effects.

Schumpeter's most popular hit was his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. In it he coins the term "creative destruction" to denote capitalism's incessant killing off of the old by the new. The book contains his famous end-of-history prediction that capitalism's very successes, not its failures and contradictions as prophesied by Karl Marx, will produce social forces -- the routinization and depersonalization of innovation, the destruction of the image of the entrepreneur as romantic hero, the creation of a class of intellectuals hostile to capitalism -- which undermine the system and lead to its demise.

If capitalism cannot survive, can one rely upon its successor, socialism, to deliver the goods and amenities of life efficiently and fairly? Yes, said Schumpeter, who proceeded to provide the supporting argument. Many readers took him at his word, but not McCraw. He sees Schumpeter's "defense" of socialism as a devastating satire that mocks the system instead of bolstering it. Schumpeter, in other words, comes not to praise socialism, but to bury it. In the end, Schumpeter's case for socialism rests on extremely abstract theoretical conditions unlikely to be realized in practice. All of which creates a problem: if Schumpeter sought to show that socialism was a practical impossibility, then why did he predict its ultimate triumph over capitalism? One wishes that the real Schumpeter would please stand up.

As for democracy, Schumpeter viewed it as a political market in which politicians compete for the votes of the electorate just as producers compete for consumers' dollars in markets for goods and services. But Schumpeter, always skeptical of consumer rationality, believed that market power resides more with vote seekers than with the electorate, whose apathy, ignorance, and lack of foresight enable politicians to set the policy agenda and to manipulate voter preferences. Even so, he felt that capitalism, as long as it operates within a proper legal framework, is largely self-regulating and so requires little intervention. It thus constrains politicians' market power more than does socialism. McCraw fails to note that these ideas mark Schumpeter as a forerunner of the modern public choice school.

The last hit in the Schumpeter canon is his History of Economic Analysis, whose title expresses his contention that the rise of analytic techniques in economics is part of the economic growth process and must be studied as such. The History, in terms of its scholarship, breadth of coverage, richness of content, originality of interpretation, and wealth of resurrected valuable ideas, ranks with Jacob Viner's 1937 book Studies in the Theory of International Trade as the finest history of thought ever written. Scholars still mine it for ideas today. Among other things, it provides sparkling accounts of the quantity theory, the gold standard, Say's Law, the development of production and utility functions, and much more.

Greatest Misses
Apart from an unfinished book on money, Schumpeter's misses include his massive, two volume Business Cycles (1939), which he wrote entirely by himself with no research assistance. Seven years in the making, it emerged stillborn from the press. McCraw, however, values the book for its historical narrative of the vicissitudes of firms in five industries and three countries. But Schumpeter's contemporaries saw only the book's prolixity, discursiveness, and lack of focus. Most of all, they rejected its contrived, mechanistic analytical schema composed of three superimposed cycles -- the 50-year Kondratieffs, 9-year Juglars, and 4-year Kitchins, all named for their discoverers -- into which Schumpeter forced his data. As if these flaws weren't enough to sink Business Cycles, it had the bad luck, and bad timing, to appear when J. M. Keynes' celebrated General Theory was sweeping the field. Everybody talked about Keynes' book, few about Schumpeter's.

Schumpeter and Keynes
Schumpeter fumed when Keynes and Keynesian economics upstaged him in the 1930s and 1940s. Economists preferred Keynes's theory to Schumpeter's because it seemed to offer a better explanation of and remedy for the Great Depression, because it possessed greater policy relevance, and because it was more amenable to the mathematical modeling, econometric testing, and national income accounting techniques just beginning to come into vogue in the 30s.

Schumpeter should have foreseen this state of affairs. It was consistent with his doctrine of creative destruction in which new theories, like new goods and new technologies, displace the old in a never ending sequence. Here Keynes was the innovator whose analysis of capitalism rested on such novel concepts as the multiplier, marginal propensity to consume, marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference function. Taken together, these Keynesian innovations were bound, according to the creative destruction doctrine, to have supplanted Schumpeter's old-fashioned theory.

Instead of accepting this outcome, Schumpeter reacted exactly as he had described entrenched interests doing when threatened by an innovation that disrupts their accustomed status quo: he put up stubborn resistance. His resistance, however, was motivated not so much by simple self interest, or desire to protect his own theory, as by his scientific judgment that Keynesian economics was fundamentally unsound.

Schumpeter accused Keynes of assessing capitalism on the basis of a short-run, depression-oriented model when only a long-run growth-oriented one would do. He scorned Keynes's claim that capitalistic economies tend to be perpetually underemployed and in need of massive government deficit spending to shore them up. He attacked the "secular stagnation" notion that capitalists face vanishing investment opportunities and slowing rates of technological progress when the opposite is true. He rejected the contention that income must be redistributed from the rich (who save too much) to the poor (who cannot afford to save) in order to boost consumption spending and aggregate demand. Nonsense, said Schumpeter. The insatiability of human wants ensures that income, regardless of who receives it, will be spent in one way or another.

McCraw does a fine job discussing Schumpeter's criticisms, all of which were valid, penetrating, and correct. He fails, however, to note that Schumpeter essentially attacked the wrong target. For it was not so much Keynes as his British and American disciples -- people like Joan Robinson; R. F. Kahn; Abba Lerner; Schumpeter's Harvard colleague Alvin Hansen; and others -- who were largely responsible for the doctrines, especially their extreme versions, that Schumpeter countered. But McCraw rightly points out that Schumpeter slipped when he opined that the Keynesian-style permanently mixed economy, or public sector-private sector partnership, was unsustainable and could not last. The private sector, Schumpeter reasoned, would become addicted to government expenditure stimulus and demand ever-increasing amounts. In this way, the public sector would expand relative to the private one and the economy would gravitate to socialism. Time has proved Schumpeter wrong. Private and public sectors have coexisted in a fairly stable ratio in most developed countries for the past sixty years.

Controversial Issues
Schumpeter held politically unpopular opinions in the 1930s when New Deal activism and populist anti-business sentiments were on the rise. He opposed President Roosevelt's New Deal reforms on the grounds that they hampered entrepreneurship and growth. For the same reason, he opposed Keynesian macro demand-management policies designed to tame the trade cycle. In his view, because growth is inherently cyclical, one flattens the cycle at the cost of eliminating growth. Other controversial opinions, all corollaries of his work on innovation and creative destruction, flowed from his pen.

Of income inequality he wrote that the gap between rich and poor is a prerequisite to and a relatively harmless byproduct of growth in a capitalistic system. The rich are necessary since it is they and not the poor who save and invest in the innovation-embodied capital formation that lifts the living standards of all. Moreover, high incomes provide both incentive and reward for the entrepreneurs who propel growth. No one need fear that an unequal distribution will condemn them to poverty. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto's notion of the "circulation of the elites" assures that. The ceaseless rise and fall of entrepreneurs into and out of the top income bracket means that it will be occupied over time by different people, many of them drawn from the ranks of the poor. The poor replace the rich and the rich the poor in never ending sequence.

In assuming a high degree of mobility across income groups, Schumpeter may have overlooked an education barrier. He failed to acknowledge that a superior education, increasingly a prerequisite to entrepreneurship and wealth in today's high tech world, is more affordable by the rich, enabling them and their offspring to stay on top.

Monopolistic firms and monopolistic profits hardly worried Schumpeter. He thought that monopolies, unless protected by government, are short lived, inherently self-destroying, and require no anti-trust legislation. Their high profits attract the very rivals and producers of substitute products that undercut them. For the same reason, he regarded anti-trust laws aimed at breaking up large, non-monopolistic firms as ill-advised. Not only are big firms often more efficient than small ones, but their research and development departments house teams of specialists functioning collectively -- and routinely -- as an entrepreneur who creates innovations that drive growth. Indeed, the very existence of R&D departments indicates that big firms realize they must continually innovate to stay alive.

Schumpeter's politically unpopular opinions continued into the wartime years of the 1940s. He distrusted Roosevelt, suspecting him of trying to establish a dictatorship. And he had mixed emotions about the Axis nations, Germany and Japan. He despised their military establishments, leaders, and advisors. But he admired the people and cultures of the two countries and feared that the United States would impose punitive reprisals at war's end. Most of all, he saw the United States' wartime ally, the Soviet Union, as its chief long-term foe, and thought that it would need Germany and Japan to serve as buffers against the communist nation. These views found little sympathy among Schumpeter's friends and associates in the ultra-patriotic environment of the early 1940s, a circumstance that caused him much unhappiness.

Schumpeter Today
The new improves upon and kills off the old. True enough. But what's new and what's old may lie in the eye of the beholder. Today's cutting-edge theorist and mathematical modeler may regard Schumpeter's analysis as older than old, a pre-Keynesian, pre-monetarist, pre-new classical/rational expectations relic. Accordingly, Schumpeter's name is stricken from required reading lists in many top graduate economic programs where theory is king. To businessmen, journalists, and historians seeking not abstract theory but rather practical understanding of global capitalism, however, his work is as fresh and insightful as the day he penned it. Journalists speak of a renaissance of Schumpeterian economics and of a reversal of his relative ranking with Keynes. Although McCraw does not say so, Schumpeter undoubtedly would be pleased, but hardly surprised, by the revival of his work. It fits his description of the zigzag path of doctrinal history in which sound economic ideas get lost or forgotten only to be rediscovered and restored to their proper place.

A Complaint
A great book deserves a great index, or at the very least an adequate one. McCraw's book has neither. Lacking comprehensiveness and precision, the index creates problems for readers searching for particular items in the text. It is inexcusable that the index fails to cover the 188 pages of endnotes containing valuable scholarly information and constituting a fourth of the book. One can fault the publisher, not the author, for this oversight. Luckily, it does little to mar McCraw's outstanding text. Elizabeth Schumpeter wrote that her husband "loved to read biographies." It's a sure bet that he would have enjoyed this one.

---Thomas M. Humphrey, reviewed for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Region Focus magazine, Fall 2007.

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