Avoid the Economist’s Folly

Peter Ducker was often said to be an economist. He wasn’t. He sometimes referred to economic theory—along with history, sociology, philosophy, theology, art, and literature—as he honed his management principles. And he admired, in particular, the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, with his entrepreneurial concept of “creative destruction.”

“It is becoming increasingly clear,” Drucker wrote in a 1983 essay, “that it is Schumpeter who will shape the thinking and inform the questions on economic policy for the rest of this century, if not for the next 30 or 50 years.”

But Drucker, whose own doctorate was in international law, couldn’t help but poke fun at practitioners of the dismal science for often being hopelessly out of touch. “In all recorded history,” Drucker once said, “there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.”