Schumpeter designed Business Cycles as his major work, but it has never received much attention. The problem is partly related to its complex treatment of the theory of waveform economic evolution and the related study of the statistics and history of 150 years of capitalist evolution, but the...

In his 1939 book Business Cycles, Schumpeter declared that the railroad and its consequences for the economic system is the standard example of his analysis of capitalist evolution. This paper demonstrates that Schumpeter went quite far in the analysis of his case of "railroadization" and in...