[1] For studies of the effect of diversified wants, see S. N. Patten, "Consumption of Wealth." It will be seen that account must be taken first of the natural expansion of the want which comes from an increase of productive power, and second of the changes in the quality of the wants to be gratified, which sometimes go ahead of any change in the productive system and call for new kinds of commodities. _Changes in Static Standards._--The grand resultant of all the changes that are going on in the more highly civilized countries is a continual rise, not only in actual wages but in the theoretical standard of wages. The static or "natural" rate of pay for labor to-day is higher than it was fifty years ago and lower than it will naturally be fifty years hence. Removing all disturbing influences and letting society settle to-day into a perfectly static condition would reveal the theoretical standard of present wages. Doing the same thing after a lapse of fifty years would show what would then be the natural or standard rate; and this would be higher than the present one. Not only would the actual pay of labor have risen, but the standard to which it tends to conform would have become higher after every interval. The actual rate of wages at any one time varies from the standard; but as both rise from decade to decade, the actual rate hovers all the while within a certain distance of the standard one. _Effects on Values._--In the same way the values of goods measured in labor will in general be declining values. At no one time will actual market prices accurately express the amounts of marginal labor that are required for producing different articles, but they will approximately express this. Articles will sell in the market for about enough to pay for the labor that, when used as marginal labor, suffices to produce them; and as this amount of labor put into a given article grows less and less, the prices of the goods will actually pay for fewer and fewer days' labor. The standard price of anything will be the amount of money that is needed to pay for the labor of making it, provided always that we are careful to use only empty-handed labor in applying the test and that we put that labor in the marginal position, as described in Chapters IV and V, and so disentangle the product that is attributable to it from that which is imputable to capital. If wages, as paid in money, remain stationary, normal prices will decline and actual prices will hover about them in their downward course, so that goods will actually buy smaller and smaller amounts of labor, or, what is the same thing, labor will secure as its pay more and more goods.[2]