Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales
Forbes, July 29th, 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.”
We have experienced the destruction wrought by the financial crisis. Now it’s time to focus on the opportunities it brings.
