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This paper has two purposes. The first is to argue that aggregate investment may be subject to the following paradox. A rise in investment decided by firms to correct overutilization of their production capacity may generate less capacity than demand — and hence cause a paradoxical rise in overutilization. This will in turn lead to even more investment, and so on — the result being the self-sustained rises in output that characterize economic expansions. The second purpose of the paper is to put forward one reason why the above paradox of investment will lose strength as expansions progress, and may eventually disappear leading to their end. That reason may be summarized as follows. As net investment increases along expansions, the effect of investment on production capacity rises relative to its effect on demand — and, as a result, the rise in utilization slows down. Moreover, as net investment eventually grows to a high level, the effect of investment on capacity may become bigger than its effect on demand. If this happens, utilization will stop rising and start falling, and thus the same may happen with investment and output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on four critical differences between capitalism of the Keynes-Kalecki times and the present-day financial capitalism. The first follows from the wholesale globalisation and liberalisation of financial and capital markets which drastically changed the nature of political opposition against full employment. The second results from changes in income and wealth distribution and in access to basic public services like health, education, and social security. The third is the evolution of the Schumpeterian entrepreneurial innovators to financial rent-seekers and speculators. The fourth relates to the question whether economic dynamics and business fluctuations are of Kaleckian nature, i.e. resulting from the feedback between the income generating effect, and the productive capacity augmenting effect, of private investment in fixed capital, or are they of Minskian financial instability nature. And if the latter is true, what is the room for any countercyclical policy that Keynes and Kalecki recommended. The essay ends with the question on how to include the Minskian financial instability of the present-day capitalism into Kalecki's canonical profit equation on which his theory of economic dynamics and business fluctuations is founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]