Joseph Alois Schumpeter (German: [ˈʃʊmpeːtɐ]; February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.

Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized creative destruction, a term coined by Werner Sombart. His magnum opus is considered to be Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Schumpeter was born in 1883 in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia (now Třešť in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary), to German-speaking Catholic parents. Though both of his grandmothers were Czech, Schumpeter did not acknowledge his Czech ancestry. His father, who owned a factory, died when Joseph was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. Schumpeter was a loyal supporter of Franz Joseph I of Austria.

Schumpeter was educated at the Theresianum and began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, an economic theorist of the Austrian School. In 1906, he received his doctoral degree from the University of Vienna's faculty of law, with a specialisation in economics. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz in modern-day Ukraine. In 1911, he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I.

In 1913–1914, Schumpeter taught at Columbia University as an invited professor. This invitation marked, according to Wolfgang Stolper, the "high point of his worldly success". He taught economic theory and met Irving Fisher and Wesley Clair Mitchell. Columbia awarded him an honorary doctorate.

In 1918, Schumpeter was a member of the Socialisation Commission established by the Council of the People's Deputies in Germany. In March 1919, he was invited to take office as Minister of Finance in the Republic of German-Austria. He proposed a capital levy as a way to tackle the war debt and opposed the socialization of the Alpine Mountain plant. In 1921, he became president of the private Biedermann Bank. He was also a board member at the Kaufmann Bank. Problems at those banks left Schumpeter in debt. His resignation was a condition of the takeover of the Biedermann Bank in September 1924.

From 1925 until 1932, Schumpeter held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. He lectured at Harvard in 1927–1928 and 1930. In 1931, he was a visiting professor at the Tokyo College of Commerce. In 1932, Schumpeter moved to the United States, and soon began what would become extensive efforts to help fellow central European economists displaced by Nazism. Schumpeter's last visit to Europe was in 1937. Schumpeter also became known for his opposition to Marxism, although he still believed the triumph of socialism to be inevitable in the long run. He also criticized Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1939, Schumpeter became a US citizen. At the beginning of World War II, the FBI investigated him and his wife, Elizabeth Boody (a prominent scholar of Japanese economics) for Nazi sympathies, but found no evidence of such leanings.

At Harvard, Schumpeter was considered a memorable character, erudite, and even showy in the classroom. He became known for his heavy teaching load and his personal and painstaking interest in his students. He served as the faculty advisor of the Graduate Economics Club and organized private seminars and discussion groups. Some colleagues thought his views were outdated by Keynesianism, which was fashionable; others resented his criticisms, particularly of their failure to offer an assistant professorship to Paul Samuelson, but recanted when they thought him likely to accept a position at Yale University. This period of his life was characterized by hard work and comparatively little recognition of his massive two-volume book Business Cycles. However, Schumpeter persevered, and in 1942 published what became the most popular of all his works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, reprinted many times and in many languages in the following decades, as well as cited thousands of times.