Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales
City Journal; April 29, 2009
The word for “crisis in Chinese, weiji, is written with two characters: one (wei) means danger; the other (ji) means opportunity. That’s because every crisis challenges the status quo and in so doing creates the opportunity for something new to emerge. “This process of Creative Destruction,” wrote economist Joseph Schumpeter, “is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”