Today and over the foreseeable future,traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful th… - Robert Heilbroner

Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits.

David Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly to the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then kicked back down to the bottom.

But the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old ones.