The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that creative destruction was “the essential fact about capitalism”. The capitalist machine constantly creates new products and markets and new methods of transportation and organisation that sweep away the old.
Occasionally, there are times when a similarly convulsive process applies to institutions and ideas, as the Northwestern University historian Joel Mokyr has described in his writings on the Industrial Revolution.
Are we living through such a moment today as a global pandemic, a technological revolution and an existential environmental threat unleash a new wave of creative destruction of old institutions and ideas?