ABSTRACT
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has some distinctive characteristics as compared to its predecessors, which bear on issues of policy. The new technologies are proving ubiquitous, progressively suffusing the older basic industries, agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry, as well as all manner of services from education and medicine to banking and communications. The simple historical fact is that for more than two centuries the dynamics of the supply of food and raw materials has interacted intimately with the dynamics of technology. Barring the opening up of new lands and other natural resources and barring the introduction of new technologies, diminishing returns would apply to the progressive exploitation of both existing natural resources and existing technologies. The relative prices of natural resources tended to move in an irregular long cycle because of the relatively longer period of gestation of investment in the commodities than in manufactures.
