2. Why Economies Develop Debt Crises: The Mathematics of Compound Interest The past century’s economic schoolbooks have described a universe running down from entropy. Production is assumed to be plagued by diminishing returns, so that each additional unit of input produces less and less output. Even if technology were recognized to raise the productivity of labor, capital and land over time, neoclassical models hold that each additional unit of consumption or wealth yields diminishing psychological utility. Not only will economies grow less rapidly, they will feel poorer. Large parts of the population in many countries are indeed becoming poorer and forced into debt, but the pessimistic assumptions cited above make no reference to debt. Their seeming independence from finance – and from social policies to deal with debt problems and wealth distribution ...