The publication date of Business Cycles proved singularly unfor- tunate. Had it appeared three years before Keynes's General Theory sent economists scurrying off in other directions instead of three years' afterwards, it would have gained from the enormous interest everyone had in business cycles in 1933 and might have been accorded a recep- tion second only to that later received by the General Theory itself. 5 Instead, it appeared just as the outbreak of World War II raised eco- nomic problems to which Keynes's tools, but not Schumpeter's, could be readily adapted. But Business Cycles lost almost as much from ap- pearing six years.
