The worldwide decline in corporate profitability in the last half century has led investors to chase easy sources of profit. Sometimes that leads to investment in high-growth technology firms - many of which turn out to be duds or scams, or simply elaborate schemes to lower labor costs in existing industries. But the consistent result, as Robert Brenner has argued, is "a world economy in which the continuation of capital accumulation has come literally to depend upon historic waves of speculation, carefully nurtured ad rationalized by state policy makers." Venture capitalists help propel the waves of speculation upon which our current regime of capital accumulation depends.