opulation
or from any other cause. Such increased saving is of course not
over-saving. The proportion, as well as the absolute amount of the
community's income which is saved, may at any time be legitimately
increased, provided that at some not distant time an increased
proportion of the then current income be consumed. If in a progressive
community the proportion of "saving" to consumption, in order to
maintain the current standard of living with the economic minimum of
"forms" of capital, be as 2 to 10, the proportion of saving in any
given year may be raised to 3 to 9, in order to provide for a future
condition in which saving shall fall to 1 to 11. Such increased
"saving" will not be over-saving; the forms of capital in which it is
embodied will not compete with previously existing forms so as to
bring down market prices. The efforts which take the form of permanent
improvements of the soil, the erection of fine buildings, docks,
railways, etc., for future use, may provide the opportunity to a
community of increasing the proportion of its savings for a number of
years. But such savings must be followed by an increased future
consumption without a correspondent saving attached to it. The notion
that we can indefinitely continue to increase the proportion of our
savings to our consumption, bounded only by the limit of actual
necessaries of life, is an illusion which places production in the
position of the human goal instead of consumption.

Sec. 16. Machinery has intensified the malady of under-consumption or
over-saving, because it has increased the opportunities of conflict
between the interests of individuals and those of the community. With
the quickening of competition in machine industries the opportunities
to individuals of making good their new "savings" by cancelling the
old "savings" of others continually grow in number, and as an ever
larger proportion of the total industry falls under the dominion of
machinery, more and more of this dislocation is likely to arise; the
struggles of weaker firms with old machinery to hold their own, the
efforts of improved machinery to find a market for its expanded
product, will continue to produce gluts more frequently, and the
subsequent checks to productive activity, the collapse of businesses,
the sudden displacement of large masses of labour, in a word, all the
symptoms of the malady of "depression" will appear with increased
virulence.

It must be clearly recognis