f labor.
(2) Increase in the stock of productive wealth.
(3) Improvements in method.
(4) Improvements in organization.

All these things affect the productive power of society, and
correlated with them and standing over against them is a fifth type of
change, which affects consumers' wants and determines how productive
power shall be used.

We have examined each single change by itself and have then endeavored
to combine them and get the grand resultant of all. Beginning with the
increase of population, we have traced its effects on wages, on
interest, and on the values of goods. We have made a similar study of
the growth of capital, the progress of technical method, and the
organization of industry.

The variation of economic society from its static standard offers a
problem for solution, and in this connection the type of change in
which the most serious evils inhere is that which discards old
technical methods and ushers in new ones. The question whether these
evils are destined to increase or to diminish we have answered
conditionally on the basis of past experience and present tendencies.
If competition continues and labor retains its mobility, the evils
will naturally grow less. The grand resultant of all the forces of
progress is an upward movement in the standard of economic life
gained, not without cost, but at a diminishing cost.

A vital question is that of the continuance of the movements now in
progress. Do any of them tend to bring themselves to a halt? Is any
change on which we rely for the hopeful outlook we have taken
self-terminating? We have found that the growth of population tends to
go on more slowly as the world becomes crowded, while the motives for
an increase of productive wealth grow stronger rather than weaker.
Technical progress gives no hint of coming to an end, and improvements
in organization may go on indefinitely, though they will naturally go
on more slowly as the modes of marshaling the agents of production are
brought nearer to perfection. Knowledge of the causes of economic
change is at best incomplete, and enlarging it by the statistical
method of study will be a chief work for the economists of the future.
Analytical study points distinctly to a coming time of increased
comfort for working humanity. Progress gives no sign of being
self-terminating, so long as the force which has been the mainspring
of it, namely, competition, shall continue to act.

The suspicious element