After twenty years of unprecedented post? war boom, the world capitalist order entered into a widespread crisis at the end of the '60s, ushering in over a decade so far of deep international recession. Throughout the OECD, the early '70s saw overall rates of growth decline, prices climb, and lay-offs multiply. These three hall-marks of the long downswing of the last third of the century remain largely unaltered today, ten years later. Deceleration, inflation and unemployment continue to be the most persistent and pervasive features of the world economic environment. The only major change since the later '70s has been a shift in the balance between inflation and unemployment a compression of the former at the expense of an expansion of the latter, without however any recovery of underlying price stability. What were the structural determinants of this deep change of historical conjuncture? Two fundamental processes were at work, undermining the bases of what had seemed to many an ever-expanding post-war prosperity in the core economies.