According to a well-known aphorism, “When mortals speak of the future, the gods smile.” The difficulties of understanding the most important causal forces influencing changes in the economic system today are daunting, and the problem is compounded by the adventitious character of many aspects of historical change. Nevertheless, the task is necessary to attempt, subjective as it may be, so that we can gain some idea of problems that are looming on the horizon. I leave policy prescriptions to another book; this is primarily an exercise in positive analysis. In this chapter I approach the problem of sketching the future of capitalism in three steps.

The first step of the argument is to investigate how the current system is performing and to ask whether the projected performance will be sufficiently poor as to force a change in the economic system. From a review of the evidence, this does not appear a promising approach.

The second step is to explore directly the sources of systemic change, either internal or external. For this purpose, I isolate four key changes: increasing structural complexity, increasing internationalization, decreasing social cohesiveness, and an enervation of the “spirit of capitalism.”

The final step is link these sources of systemic change to particular scenarios. With regard to changes in the structural complexity of the economy, this has already been carried out in previous chapters where I have tried to show the impact of increasing structural complexity on a variety of economic institutions.