1942 Joseph Schumpeter argued that innovation was the main event, that increasing returns were potentially infinite: ‘It is one of the safest predictions that in the calculable future we shall live in an embarras de richesse of both foodstuffs and raw materials, giving all the rein to expansion of total output that we shall know what to do with.’ This was a distinctly unfashionable view even at the time, and it remains so today, though the intervening years have shown it to be true so far. Keynes, for instance, thought the Great Depression represented the arrival of diminishing returns and the
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