ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as political economists struggled to understand how the new economic system which came to be called "capitalism" works, some focused on reasons to believe the system was "self-regulating" and capable of sustaining progress indefinitely. Malthus is most famous for his theory of immiseration due to population growth, but he also worried about "general gluts" – an oversupply of output which exceeds the demand to buy it. Marx dismissed the Malthusian theory of population as "a libel against the human race". Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory is a theory of stages of capitalism. Capitalist stage theory focuses on periods intermediate in length between a short-run business cycle and overall capitalist history. The most important modern elaboration of Marx's early warnings that money and credit contain the seeds of crisis is Hyman Minsky's "financial instability hypothesis".
