The correct answer to the question, 'Why are we not richer in proportion to the increase in our productive capacity?' is this: _Because wealth does not consist in what can be produced, but in what is actually produced; the actual production, however, depends not merely upon the amount of productive power, but also upon the extent of what is required, not merely upon the possible supply, but also upon the possible demand: the current social arrangements, however, prevent the demand from increasing to the same extent as the productive capacity._ In other words: We do not produce that wealth which our present capacity makes it possible for us to produce, but only so much as we have use for; and this use depends, not upon our capacity of producing, but upon our capacity of consuming. It is now plain why the economic problem of the disparity between the possible and the actual increase of wealth is of so comparatively recent a date. Antiquity and the middle ages knew nothing of this problem, because human labour was not then productive enough to do more than provide and maintain the means of production after covering the consumption of the masses and the possessors of property. There was in those ages a demand for all the things which labour was then able to produce; full employment could be made of any increase of capacity to create wealth; no one could for a moment be in doubt as to the purpose which the increased power of producing had served; there was no economic problem to call into existence a special science of political economy. Then came the Renaissance; the human mind awoke out of its thousand years of hibernation; the great inventions and discoveries rapidly followed one upon another; division of labour and the mobilisation of capital gave a powerful impulse to production; and now, for the first time, the productiveness of labour became so great, and the impossibility of using as much as labour could produce became so evident, that men were compelled to face the perplexing fact which finds expression in the economic problem.