Where's Harry Seldon When We Really Need Him?

The wave of darkness and iniquity spreading across the land doesn't require a Dr. Evil to be behind it.

All it requires is a convergence of interests, as Shystee points out.

Similarly, even if Dr. Evil and the bad boys (and girls) behind him do the frog-march, it's not going to do more than skim the foam off of the tsunami.

For a real fun read on the physical principles behind the scene go read the posting on Emergence.

To complement the portion that Shystee quoted, I'd like to add this note:

Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. This can be a dynamic process (occurring over time), such as the evolution of the human brain over thousands of successive generations; or emergence can happen over disparate size scales, such as the interactions between a macroscopic number of neurons producing a human brain capable of thought (even though the constituent neurons are not themselves conscious). For a phenomenon to be termed emergent it should generally be unpredictable from a lower level description. Usually the phenomenon does not exist at all or only in trace amounts at the very lowest level...

It should be emphasized that in each of these cases, while an emergent phenomenon at the macroscopic scale does not directly exist at the microscopic scale, its existence at macroscopic scales can still be explained (perhaps after a substantial amount of rigorous or semi-rigorous mathematical analysis) by the laws of physics at microscopic scales, taking into account the interactions between all the microscopic components of a macroscopic object. Thus, emergent phenomena can demonstrate why a reductionistic physical theory, viewing all matter in terms of its component parts, which in turn obey a relatively small number of laws, can hope to model complex objects such as living beings. However, by the same token, emergent phenomena serve to caution against greedy reductionism, because the microscopic explanation of an emergent phenomenon may be too complicated or "low-level" to be of any practical use...

Speaking of the physical description of things you can't do a lot about, check out the link on Kondratiev Waves.

By this measure, the peaks and nadirs of modern human economic activity come in 50 year cycles. The last lowest point?

Fall of 2001. I agree entirely.