Innovative investment was financed not by savings but by credit, with interest paid from the profits generated by innovation. Schumpeter saw the development initiated by innovation as uneven, discontinuous, and taking the form of business cycles, rather than causing deviations in a kind of dynamic equilibrium. These business cycles could be shot-term (40 months), medium-term (9-10 years), or long-term (for example, the Kondratieff long waves of 50-55 years; Kuznets 1953), which Schumpeter conceptualized as epochs with different values and civilizational characteristics. In this view, economic change is not the result of slow movement from one equilibrium to another but rather is driven by the pursuit of the quasi-monopolistic profits that accrue to innovators. Economic change is propelled by the succession of technologies and practices that destroy old, inefficient arrangements as newer, more efficient, ones are created. New ideas are frequently created by new firms: the business that builds the first railroad is seldom the business that previously operated the stage coaches (Schumpeter 1934). New businesses develop new ideas that displace the old ones. The result is what Schumpeter calls "creative destruction." But for all his praise of the entrepreneur, Schumpeter also thought that an economy satiated with capital and rationalized by entrepreneurial minds would eventually become socialist (Schumpeter 1934; Shionoya 1997).