Here is a link worth reading if you're considering the social, political and economic changes of the last 40 years (it is written by Leon Trotsky): http://www.

Here is a link worth reading if you're considering the social, political and economic changes of the last 40 years (it is written by Leon Trotsky): http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm Essentially, increasing competition drives down profit margins in existing market sectors. Companies respond by increasing automation so that they can generate arbitrage profits against the "average" price dictated by the cost of the generation of a unit of the good by their competitors. The other companies catch up, however, and this process itself is deleterious since profit is generated by accumulating the surplus value of the labor embodied in a unit of the commodity. As this process reaches it's nadir, the economic character of society is marked by speculation, increasing international tension, and market crashes. Once the fictitious capital that has outstripped the value in the real economy is destroyed, growth can begin anew. Based on Nikolai Kondratiev research, these growth and contraction cycles operate on approximately 30 to 40 year cycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave What's particularly fascinating (detailed in Trotsky's article) is how the growth / contraction cycles operate on human culture and thought. Thus 60 years ago, the United States could be a signatory to a Declaration on Universal Human Rights and today find itself denying that it's own citizens have a right to due process. Anyways, I could go on, but I'd be rambling :)