ABSTRACT
THE nature of this problem can be most tellingly displayed against the background of contemporaneous discussion. The present generation of economists has witnessed not only a world-wide depression of unusual severity and duration but also a subsequent period of halting and unsatisfactory recovery. I have already submitted my own interpretation 1 of these phenomena and stated the reasons why I do not think that they necessarily indicate a break in the trend of capitalist evolution. But it is natural that many if not most of my fellow economists should take a different view. As a matter of fact they feel, exactly as some of their predecessors felt between 1873 and 1896—though then this opinion was mainly confined to Europe—that a fundamental change is upon the capitalist process. According to this view, we have been witnessing not merely a depression and a bad recovery, accentuated perhaps by anti-capitalist policies, but the symptoms of a permanent loss of vitality which must be expected to go on and to supply the dominating theme for the remaining movements of the capitalist symphony; hence no inference as to the future can be drawn from the functioning of the capitalist engine and of its performance in the past.
