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" First, that capitalists invest in the pursuit of high returns; when and where returns go down, capital accumulation tends to go down as well. Second, that as capitalists as a class accumulate more and more capital, the productivity of capital becomes lower because there are not enough workers to work with it. In economics this is known as diminishing returns. It has a long pedigree. French economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who was briefly France’s finance minister and one of the many experts who tried unsuccessfully to head off France’s headlong descent into the economic chaos that eventually precipitated the French Revolution, wrote about it in 1767.30 Karl Marx took it as a premise. As he saw it, this was why capitalism was doomed: the insatiable greed of the capitalist class in the pursuit of more and more capital will drive the return on capital into the ground (in Marxist parlance this is called the “falling rate of profit”) and precipitate the crises that eventually end capitalism.31 "

Abhijit V. Banerjee , Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems


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Abhijit V. Banerjee quote : First, that capitalists invest in the pursuit of high returns; when and where returns go down, capital accumulation tends to go down as well. Second, that as capitalists as a class accumulate more and more capital, the productivity of capital becomes lower because there are not enough workers to work with it. In economics this is known as diminishing returns. It has a long pedigree. French economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who was briefly France’s finance minister and one of the many experts who tried unsuccessfully to head off France’s headlong descent into the economic chaos that eventually precipitated the French Revolution, wrote about it in 1767.30 Karl Marx took it as a premise. As he saw it, this was why capitalism was doomed: the insatiable greed of the capitalist class in the pursuit of more and more capital will drive the return on capital into the ground (in Marxist parlance this is called the “falling rate of profit”) and precipitate the crises that eventually end capitalism.31