Let's put the depression in terms of an agglomeration

My view, then, is simple. Info tech suddenly equalized the utility of capital across the globe. We had sudden agglomeration in China/Asia on a huge scale. That in turn caused sudden shortages in industrialized west, mainly in energy.



Historical:
This is the sudden appearance of order in the economy due to info shock.

The two periods to compare were Hoover and Clinton. Both key people who got it, especially Hoover. Both were racing to get ahead of info tech revolutions. Clinton the web and Hoover broadcast radio. (Hoover's son was a Ham and a garage entrepreneur for military radios.) The long depression caused by port congestion with the arrival of under sea cable. Always the same pattern, sudden widespread information about goods causes distribution to be requantized; and transportation clogs up. Think three day traffic jams in China.

Here is a PHD thesis, compare traffic jams in America before and after the arrival of broadcast radio in metropolitan areas.

Its a common pattern. The social past time of cheering the fastest schooner to bring European news to American shores, before international cable. The affect of the rotary press in British division of labor and products. Gutenberg press and its effects. All of the info tech shocks fouling up transportation somehow. And always components of info tech invade transportation to solve the problem.

Anyway, as always the problem appears as too many people in the queues.

Let's go on a bit. Our heads see inventory farther out in the economy, we see a bigger picture of the production chain. We remap our local environment to the new view. The new information is the sudden appearance of hidden order, unattended aggregates appear in the economy. That is order which we then disorder. That's maximum entropy, a finite Shannon channel.

How does evolution do it?
I think the heart of this process is that evolution somehow managed a natural Gibbs detector. This is the separator: How close is close enough. That breakthrough allowed multi-stage distribution, migration, flocking, herding and other aggregate functions. But the Gibbs separation is the SNR, the naturally constant signal to noise ratio.