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Rifkin - Zero Marginal Cost Society Ch 1, 12, 13.pdf 
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Powerful industry leaders often strive to restrict entry of new en-
terprises and innovations. But slowing down or stopping new, more 
productive technologies to protect prior capital investments creates a 
positive-feedback loop by preventing capital from investing in profitable 
new opportunities. If capital can't migrate to new profitable investments, 
the economy goes into a protracted stall. 
Lange described the struggle that pits capitalist against capitalist in 
stark terms. He writes: 
The stability of the capitalist system is shaken by the alternation of at-
tempts to stop economic progress in order to protect old investments and 
tremendous collapses when those attempts fail.' 
Tools Sign Comn 
Attempts to block economic progress invariably fail because new en-
trepreneurs are continually roaming the edges of the system in search of 
innovations that increase productivity and reduce costs, allowing them to 
win over consumers with cheaper prices than those of their competitors. 
The race Lange outlines is relentless over the long run, with proiluctiv-
ity continually pushing costs and prices down, forcing profit margins to 
shrink. 
While most economists today would look at an era of nearly free 
goods and services with a sense of foreboding, a few earlier economists 
expressed a guarded enthusiasm over the prospect. Keynes, the venerable 
twentieth-century economist whose economic theories still hold consider-
able weight, penned a small essay in 1930 entitled "Economic Possibilities 
for Our Grandchildren," which appeared as millions of Americans were 
beginning to sense that the sudden economic downturn of 1929 was in fact 
the beginning of a long plunge to the bottom. 
Keynes observed that new technologies were advancing productivity 
and reducing the cost of goods and services at an unp

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