nsumers' wealth, values, measured in ultimate units of utility or
disutility, rise. An increase of capital does not directly neutralize
this effect, since it does not change the number of consumers; but it
multiplies commodities and brings down their utilities and their
values. The rise of "subjective" values which follows an influx of
laborers is an indication of diminished wealth per capita, and the
reduction of values which follows an influx of capital is a sign of
increased wealth per capita.

3. _Changes of Method._--Changes take place in the methods of
production. New processes are devised, improved machines are invented,
cheap motive powers are utilized, and cheap and available raw
materials are discovered, and these changes continually disturb the
static state. There are certain to be improvements on the older
methods of production, for a law of the survival of the fittest
insures this.

Under competition the process that, with a given amount of labor and
capital, turns out a larger product inevitably displaces one that
turns out less. The employer who is using the better method undersells
those who use inferior ones, and forces them either to improve their
own methods or to go out of business. Working humanity as a whole is
therefore making a constant gain in producing power, as man's
appliances equip him more and more effectively for his conflict with
nature and enable him to subjugate it more rapidly and thoroughly. It
would seem that they ought to have only good effects on wages, and in
the long run they invariably do have such effects. In the absence of
improvements there would be little hope for the future of wage
earners. The immediate effects of improvements upon individual
workers, as we shall see, are not always unqualifiedly good, but the
essential effect is the general and permanent one, and the character
of this has been attested by past experience too fully to be in
doubt. In improvements in production lies the hope of laboring
humanity. Nearly the whole earning power of the labor of the present
day is the result of improvements that have taken place in the past,
though these gains have not been secured without causing local and
temporary hardships. If in the future the wages of labor are doubled
or quadrupled, as the result of a series of improvements beginning now
and extending to a remote period, this progress cannot be secured for
nothing. The costs will be less than those attending improveme