2 
II. Since the stagnation of the 30'ies great historical 
changes have gone on, and they may affect my arguments 
about concentration, competition and income distribution, 
about excess capacity and stagnation, and their relevance 
to the post-war development before and since 1975. 
One change has been the opening of the system: The 
growing importance of foreign transactions and, even 
more, of the state sector, the budget and taxation. 
These things were always much more important in Europe 
than in the U.S. I chose as a model for my maturity 
theory; they have in the meantime become more important 
in the U.S. too. 
Another change occurred in the labour market. Up to 1974, 
more or less, there was full (or high) employment, a 
world vastly different from pre-war. It affected, I think, 
strongly the distribution of income between labour and 
capital. There was a certain shift of competition from 
the market for goods to the labour market, (although 
this would hardly operate perceptibly in the international 
field, where competition in the goods markets continued 
to dominate). While the industrial reserve army in Europe 
tended to vanish, it was replenished or to some extent 
replaced, by influx from agriculture,, from the reservoir 
of female labour, and from abroad. The cost of training