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But there is another class of forces called traps that are self-explanatory: once entered, traps are difficult or impossible to escape due to their inherent (ontological) nature. While all the traps have conceptual elements, each is very much grounded in the real world.

For instance, once a nation misallocates its capital into unneeded malls, office towers and exurban housing which now sit vacant and decaying, that capital can never be recovered.

1. Scalability Trap. This is a way of describing the inevitability of job losses in any industry as it scales up to technologically optimum (automated) production. Oftwominds.com correspondent K.D. (who coined the term Scalability Trap, as far as I can tell) termed this process a "modernity tax," or the cost of modern productivity.

It might be also be considered a "technology/trade tax on employment." That is, if an economy refused technological production then it could not trade such expensively produced products profitably. Even the lowest-cost labor is more expensive than machines because machinery does not get sick, does not need to be trained, does not spoil production with errors, does not riot when idled, etc.

Just as the agricultural workforce of the U.S. has fallen to 2% from 50% as mechanization scaled up, any work which can be largely automated (not just manufacturing, but software coding, tax preparation, etc.) will fall into a scalability trap once the technology is available to automate production.

2. Capital Trap. In my lexicon, there are three applications of this term:

 Banking/finance capital trap. As bank assets fall in value (mortgages on foreclosed homes and commercial real estate, credit-default derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, etc.) then banks' capital requirements increase dramatically.

Additional reserves are simply trapped capital as the capital constraint will lead to a downward spiral of higher interest rates for borrowers (as banks try to "earn their way out of insolvency"), a slowdown in borrowing (due to higher risk management/qualification standards), more loan defaults (as those who planned to roll over old debt find they no longer qualify to do so), and thus more erosion of bank capital as bad-debt/impaired loan losses keep mounting.

 National investment trap. The U.S. as a nation has poured staggering sums of its national wealth into speculatively built, rapidly depreciating real estate: malls nobody wants to rent or own, roads to weedy subdivisions, 20 million empty homes, office towers with 90% vacancy rates, empty storefronts, etc. The capital in all this unnecessary real estate is trapped because it cannot be sold--it is illiquid except at fire-sale prices, at which point the remaining shards of capital are finally freed but the owners have to book catastrophic losses in the capital. Rather than be declared insolvent, the owners (often the banks holding foreclosed properties) leave the capital trapped, hoping for some magical rescue via a new real estate bubble.

This misallocated capital hurts the owner and the nation in another way: trapped in impaired and unneeded real estate, it cannot be invested elsewhere where it might earn a real return. Unfortunately, America's suburbs, malls and office parks are now "capital traps" of national savings.

 Homeowner's capital trap. The housing bubble attracted many buyers who either sought a low-down/no-down speculative investment (i.e. buy a super-leveraged house to "flip" for a quick profit) or who were unqualified by prudent pre-bubble standards but qualified via "liar loans" (no-document mortgages) and fraudulent appraisals and mortgages applications. As prices plummeted, the value of their houses soon fell far below the mortgage and these speculators exited via foreclosure, walking away, etc.

Since these speculators put up little or no capital, there is no capital to be trapped. But those who put down 20% cash or who already owned a home found themselves in a capital trap. When an asset starts depreciating rapidly, the smart investment decision is to sell