ABSTRACT
While concern with the problem of economic instability has punctuated the history of economic thought for several centuries, it is hardly surprising that the Great Depression of the twentieth century inspired a vast literature on the issue of investment failure and the maladjustment of investment plans.2 In particular, the persistence of the depression and the over a decade-long weakening of economic performance that it caused prompted several investigators to formulate a “stagnation thesis” concerning mature capitalist economies. It was within this theoretical tradition that Josef Steindl made his remarkable contribution, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism, in 1952.3 Many empirical and theoretical inadequacies in other long-run arguments concerning the depression had spurred efforts to develop a more coherent and verifiable approach to the study of secular mechanisms in the inter-war period. Steindl’s research, in this regard, attempted to resolve these weaknesses directly.
