Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, And Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process.

SCHUMPETER, Joseph A.

Item Number: 3909

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1939.

First edition of the economist’s ground-breaking work. Octavo, 2 volumes. Original cloth. Some light rubbing to the cloth, a very good set of this landmark work. From the library of economist Moses Abramovitz, with his signature to volume one. Abramovtitz was known for his Catch-Up Growth Hypothesis, which attempted to explain what caused Western Europe’s Golden Era of economic growth from 1948 until 1972 and also for his work on business cycles. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Rare and desirable with noted provenance.

Schumpeter’s theory of business cycles puts its emphasis on industrial innovations rather than banking. Schumpeter starts his account of business cycles at the top rather than the bottom of the cycle. "The reader needs only to make the experiment. If he comes to survey industrial history from, say, 1760 onwards, he will discover two things; he will find that very many booms are unmistakably characterized by revolutionary changes in some branch of industry which, in consequence, leads the boom, railways, for instance in the forties, or steel in the eighties, or electricity in the nineties."