Regarding Schumpeter, it seems to me that there is a basic issue underlying most of this discussion, including Solow's criticism of Schumpeter and the concept of obsolescence in relation to creative destruction. One can describe this in terms of the notion that there are two classes of economists. First, there are those who look at the economic world (economic growth, economic fluctuations) in terms of mechanical forces, many of which remain to be discovered by mining the data sets. This view was bolstered by the macroeconomics boom of the 1950s and 1960s, which incorporated the fledgling methods of econometrics and mathematical modeling. Obsolescence, from this point of view, is an event that occurs as time passes through the operation of the mechanical forces. Second. there are those who look at the economic world in terms of distinctly human action. In this view, it is not mechanical forces, but human entrepreneurship that causes the economic world to be what it is and to change. The newest of the new growth theory, for example, sees growth as the consequence of human capital, which distinctly human actors produce under particular institutional conditions. Obsolescence, in this view, is due to the invention and innovation of entrepreneurship. I am not well read on Schumpeter. But all of the things that I have read by him suggest that he saw the economic world as being entrepreneurship-driven. Surely this is true of his concept of creative destruction. The paradox, of course, is his far-fetched prediction that entrepreneurship would ultimately become routine enough to be capable of surviving a turn toward socialism. Pat Gunning