Conclusion

No economic theory can be complete if it does not take into account everything we already know about economic development and consumer behaviour. Existing economic theory which economists and business people use to forecast future economic development, has as one of its basic tenets that there is an infinite number of business opportunities that can be discovered by companies and investors. It is the main argument of this book that this may not be so. We can no longer take it for granted that people can come up with new business ideas in the future at the same rate as in the past. If we look at development over the past millennia, it seems as if we have mainly made existing activities more efficient and invented few genuinely new activities. This improvement of activities has been sufficient in the past to keep growth in the economy. Now, we are approaching a point where information can be handled and distributed in almost no time and at a cost that comes close to zero. Activities that require the handling of materials, such as production and transportation, are also in many ways approaching a limit of what can be achieved. This limit is, for a number of reasons, not zero, but it is obvious that a production and supply process that now takes two weeks is much closer to the limit than when the same process took 19 weeks.