The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion …
Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method
of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.
And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is
not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social
and natural environment which changes and by its change alters
the data of economic action; this fact is important and these
changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial
change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary
character due to a quasi-automatic increase in population and
capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems, of which exactly
the same thing holds true. The fundamental impulse that sets
and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new
consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation,
the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that
capitalist enterprise creates.
(Joseph Schumpeter, "Creative Destruction"
From Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 1942, p. 82)
