num_pages: 320
description: 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.
language: English
title: Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter's Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle
publisher: Cornell University Press