Sweezy versus Schumpeter - knock down, drag out

If the narcissist leaders of Silicon Valley have Ayn Rand, the intellectual lodestone of its academic acolytes has been the work of Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter's notion of 'creative destruction' and his focus on the innovator and the entrepreneur as the motor of capitalism has found its way into the work of futurists and theorists of technology, hailing from both left and right.

This fascinating article by John Bellamy Foster tells the story of the 1946 Harvard debate between Schumpeter and Paul Sweezy over the nature of capitalist development. The article features a discussion of a note, long thought mythical, of the issues discussed in the debate.