Some scholars note the paradox that technical change is considered to be the most important source of economic dynamism, the rate of change in capitalist economies, but it is ignored in mainstream media.
In free-market economies, technological advances lead to increases in productivity, but at the expense of older, less-efficient means of production, creating a level of subjective risk for which the compensation (in theory) is the return on capital.
From a capital finance point of view, advances in technology are the classic definition of systemic market risk.
In its purest form, capitalism entails a constant level of creative destruction of a portion of the means of production and the increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the subject economy reflects the growth after the losses due to economic obsolescence have been reconciled.
The "natural process" of capitalism (including creative destruction) is the subject of great contention by adherents of other systems of macroeconomic organization who see the end-result of obsolescence as the creation of a permanent underclass that has an unequal level of access to capital investment, educational resources that are not necessarily of their own making, while others seek to create an equal outcome for disproportionate labor or capital inputs that have not as yet been able to demonstrate a viable model that can compete against free-market economies on a near-term or long-term basis.