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Social Economic Statics, and in order to have them distinctly before
us we have created in imagination a society which is changeless in
size, in form, and in mode of economic action. In such a condition
the wages of labor would remain fixed, as would also the interest on
capital. Wages and interest would absorb the whole product of social
industry; for the static condition, as we have thus created it,
excludes profits of the _entrepreneur_. In broad outline this
describes the condition toward which certain economic forces are
continually impelling the actual world.

There is at each period a standard shape and mode of action to which
static laws acting by themselves would bring economic society. This
social norm, however, is not the same at any two periods. The static
laws remain unchanged, but they act in changing conditions, and if
they were left alone and undisturbed, would give one result in 1907
and another in 2007. The changes which a century will bring should
make society larger and richer, the mode of production more effective,
and the returns for all classes greater. The laws which set the
standard of wages and interest will remain the same, but if the
tendencies now at work have their natural effect, all these incomes
will be larger. It is as though great quantities of water were rushing
into a lake and causing disturbances and upheavals of the surface. If
the inflow should now stop, the surface would subside to a general
level. If the inflow should recommence, go on for a hundred years, and
then stop, the surface would again subside to a level, but it would be
higher than the former one. Yet _the laws of equilibrium which
produced the first static level would be identically the same as those
which produced the second_. Social Economic Statics is a body of
principles which act in every stage of civilization and draw society
at every separate period toward a static norm, though they do not at
any two periods draw it toward the same norm. They make actual society
hover forever about a changing standard shape.

The laws which govern progress--which cause the social norm to take a
different character from decade to decade, and cause actual society to
hover near it in its changes--are the subject of Social Economic
Dynamics. We have made a study of the more general economic changes
which affect the social structure, and they stand in this order:--

(1) Increase of population, involving increase in the supply o