What would Joseph Schumpeter have made of Apple?

There is an inconvenient truth about Joseph Schumpeter, patron saint of this column. As an economist, his biggest contribution was to single out entrepreneurs as core to the business cycle. Early in his career he made champions of them, describing them as swashbuckling iconoclasts who overthrow the existing order motivated by sheer chutzpah. Yet later in life, when he coined his famous term “creative destruction”, he applied it not to…