Veblen argued that pursuit of gain often caused unemployment, higher prices and costs, and delayed innovation. He thought that borrowing on the basis of anticipated earnings created business cycles of expansion and contraction that enabled large firms to swallow smaller ones. Rather than focusing on class conflicts creating the dynamic of capitalist history (as did Marx), Veblen emphasized conflicts among three cultural tendencies: the machine process, business enterprise, and warlike or predatory beliefs. Business enterprise, he thought, would eventually fail, and the future system would either involve domination by engineers or a reversion to archaic absolutism under military domination (Germany and Japan were cited as examples). Veblen reversed the arguments of neoclassicism.