Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter's Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle (Cornell Studies in Money)

Capital as Will and Imagination investigates the nature of capital creation--a fundamental, unresolved question in the history of capitalism. Japan's experience after World War II offers the clearest possible case study. To understand what happened, this study turns to a neglected aspect of Joseph Schumpeter's theory of economic development: the nexus between money creation by banks, investment, and inflation. Economists and planners in postwar Japan found in Schumpeter's ideas a description of what they saw happening around them. They also put these ideas directly to work. Asian-style high-speed growth, as pioneered in Japan in the 1950s, presents capitalist industrial development in its most intensified form, but in fact the story is a global one. The shadow of credit is debt, and the worldwide debt bubbles of recent times reveal the limits of the twentieth-century growth model.