Creative Destruction is not yet a household term like “laissez-faire” but it’s getting there — helped along today by the Freakonomics guys writing on their New York Times blog:

The turbulence of the U.S. economy has lots of people railing against capitalism itself, and with good reason: capitalism is inherently turbulent. That’s why the legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction.”

In my book Slackonomics — an obvious derivative of the Freakonomics title — I try to expand the term “creative destruction” beyond its strictly economic definition into a cultural realm. The subtitle of the book is “Generation X in the Age of Creative destruction,” and in the final chapter, I use graffiti and street art as a metaphor for creative destruction. But it’s more than just a metaphor, it IS creative destruction. The cultural milieu we create is very much a reflection of the economic era that we live in, from extreme sports to graffiti art to alternative comedy (i.e. a sardonic sense of humor as perfected by Banksy the graffiti artists, whose work is pictured above). Read the rest of this entry » »