y new "wants" as they are called, and
to represent a vast quantity of "satisfactions" not existing before.

Nor is the money calculus of any avail. Comparison by prices breaks down
entirely. A bushel of wheat stands about where it stood before and could
be calculated. But the computation, let us say, in price-values of the
Sunday newspapers produced in one week in New York or the annual output
of photographic apparatus, would defy comparison. Of the enormous
increase in the gross total of human goods there is no doubt. We have
only to look about us to see it. The endless miles of railways, the
vast apparatus of the factories, the soaring structures of the cities
bear easy witness to it. Yet it would be difficult indeed to compute by
what factor the effectiveness of human labor working with machinery has
been increased.

But suppose we say, since one figure is as good as another, that it has
been increased a hundred times. This calculation must be well within the
facts and can be used as merely a more concrete way of saying that the
power of production has been vastly increased. During the period of this
increase, the numbers of mankind in the industrial countries have
perhaps been multiplied by three to one. This again is inexact, since
there are no precise figures of population that cover the period. But
all that is meant is that the increase in one case is, quite obviously,
colossal, and in the other case is evidently not very much.

Here then is the paradox.

If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so
that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did
before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times
better off. But it is not. Or else, as the other possible alternative,
the working hours of the world should have been cut down to about one in
thirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we to
explain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and resulting
human happiness?

The more we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing it
seems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold distance of
the moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor presented on the
surface of our globe; and suppose that such an observer knew nothing of
our system of individual property, of money payments and wages and
contracts, but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass of animated
beings trying to supply their wants.