Some Empirical Evidence In Support Of Creative Destruction Being Good

See Why Is Failure a Sign of a Healthy Economy? A Guest Post by Tim Harford at Freakonomics. Excerpt:

"A more rigorous attempt to look at this question, a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of “rising stars” but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it’s healthy."

Earlier he mentioned:

"In 1982, the management consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, a colossally popular business title. The book aimed to learn lessons from the world’s best companies, and Peters and Waterman produced a list of 43. But just a couple of years after In Search of Excellence had been published, BusinessWeek ran a cover story with the simple title: “Oops! Who’s Excellent Now?” Almost a third of the companies singled out for praise by Peters and Waterman were in financial trouble."