Creative Destruction II

Schumpeter seems to have popularized the notion of creative destruction in economics, but the concept has an ancient pedigree. Ancient cultures often symbolized it through human sacrifice and other sacrificial ceremonies. The process itself is everywhere evident in the universe, in life and death and in the sometimes gradual but frequently catastrophic processes of geology and astrophysics.

The Maya took the concept literally enough that they more or less destroyed most of their possessions, including buildings, every fifty-two years. Smaller sacrificial acts, including human sacrifice were annual or even more frequent.

The Permian-Triassic extinction event, the most dramatic in the fossil record, killed off something like 90% of all species, and probably all but a tiny fraction of individual animals. It took at least ten million years for species diversity to recover, but when it did its composition was quite unlike that of the previous history of animal life on the planet. The catastrophic destruction of old life cleared the way for some dramatic innovations, including those leading to the reptilian mega-fauna of the next 190 million years or so.

Other episodes of creative destruction are easy to find closer to home. The genocidal catastrophes unleashed by Columbus and those who followed him made possible the creation of new nations and even new types of nations in the New World. The catastrophes of the Communist Revolution and the World Wars of the Twentieth Century similarly unleashed creative potential in both Europe and Asia.

For living creatures, creation and destruction takes place at a multitude of levels. Species, population, and individual each

struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Within each individual, the cycle proceeds as well, with cells and tissues continually being destroyed and recycled. Even inside the cell, the molecules that make it up mostly have far briefer lives than the cells they constitute, living each for an hour or a microsecond, and then back to the destructor.

If we peer down to the very fabric of reality, quantum field theory teaches us to understand all interactions in terms of creation and annihilation operators. If you spy a distant star, some few photons from that star annihilated on your retina and created some molecular excitations that would ultimately be amplified (through yet more creation and annihilation event) to the signal in your brain. The gravitational forces holding that star together are transmitted by the continual creation and annihilation of gravitons, and similarly, the electromagnetic forces that hold your eye together are transmitted by photons.

One’s attitude toward creative destruction might be shaped by whether one expects to be a survivor or a victim. Some might even question whether the two are inextricably linked, but I don’t think the link can be broken. A more pertinent question is whether it is possible or desirable to limit the destructive effects on individuals, and if so, how can society best be organized to such ends.

The hierarchy of creation and destruction is what makes possible society, life, and the organized universe. I will look at the application to economics in a later post.