Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

In order that new industries may grow fast enough it is usually necessary that some old industries should be allowed to shrink or die. In doing this they help to release the necessary capital and labor for the new industires.

They lend him the other three-fourths; and he gets the farm. There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has.

The real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, to increase economic welfare.

Let us, therefore, try to see exactly what happens when technical improvements and labor-saving machinery are introduced.

The problem of distribution, on which all the stress is being put today, is after all more easily solved the more there is to distribute.

But in any case, machines, inventions and discoveries increase real wages.

Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.

It is solved precisely through the price system. It is solved through the constantly changing interrelationships of costs of production, prices and profits.

What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others.