The boys from Cafe Hayek, as they do so often, came up with this piece of wisdom in plain language. I'm feeling idle tonight so I reprint it without comment which would, in any case, be superfluous:
"Economist Joseph Schumpeter noted this fact in 1942: 'Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them.
It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man.
Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.'"
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