Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Thriving at Amazon: How Schumpeter Lives in Books Today

by

*Arthur Diamond* is a professor of economics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His past research has often been on the economics of science, history of economic thought, and labor economics. He recently has published articles on the contributions to

Abstract

Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book” feature provides a new and exciting tool for bibliometric research. Over the last few years, a growing number of books listed on Amazon. com reference Schumpeter in some way. As of May 3, 2007, Amazon listed 8,086 books that in some way refer to Schumpeter. Of these, I currently have names and titles of 3,719 books in the Schumpeter Amazon database. Of these, I have done content-analysis for 1,176 books that make reference to Schumpeter. The main result is that a significant number of the references to Schumpeter are related to creative destruction. The percent of Schumpeter-references where the reference is related to creative destruction is significantly higher for books on business than books on economics. I believe this is a case where market demand reflects intellectual value, even if academic economics has not done much to incorporate Schumpeter’s central ideas

in Economics in Practice

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Volume (Issue)
4(3)
Pages
338-344
Published
JEL classification
A11, B25, O30
Keywords
Schumpeter, creative destruction, bibliometrics, technology, growth, productivity
Article PDF Downloads
3,030 (updated 31 Dec 2011)

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