The first stage is marked by the fact, pure and simple, of a technical improvement. Now technical improvement, among its logical, or what is the same thing, its necessary effects, in no way includes that of an increase in the amount of total capital employed, nor that of leaving the quantity of total capital unchanged. It has rather exactly the opposite as its necessary and immediate effect: _i.e._ that of _limiting the capital employed_. It is unnecessary to warn the reader that we are here treating of economic science and that increase and decrease refer always to _economic values_. In its simplest form, supposing the quantity of objects produced to be constant (200 shoes are required, and there is no reason to increase the production), technical progress will consist, purely and simply, in a saving of social expense: the same production at less expense. And since all cost, in Marx's hypothesis resolves itself into social labour, there will be the same production with less social labour. If it were not so, it would not be worth while to introduce this technical innovation; there would be, economically, no improvement but either the _status quo ante_ or a regression. We must not take into account the other effects which would arise to increase production, greater consumption, increase of population, etc: additional and extraneous facts which are not considered here, since we are concerned with the single fact of technical improvement, all other conditions remaining unchanged. And, in such a case, we cannot represent technical improvement with the increasing series of total capital which Marx employs, viz. 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, etc., but with this decreasing one, 150, 140, 130, 120, 110, etc. And to keep to the illustration used above, if we suppose that the given technical improvement has caused a decrease of 1/10 in the total social labour required, we shall have in place of the original capital of 1,000 a capital of 900, no longer made up of 500 fixed and 500 floating, but of 450 fixed and 450 floating. The decrease must affect proportionally every part of the capital since all of it is, in the final analysis, a product of labour. Of the 100 original labourers, 1/10, _i.e._ 10 of them will remain unemployed: a fraction of the original capital will remain unemployed; the quantity (or utility) of the goods produced will remain the same.[90] When the description of the facts is thus corrected, there is no doubt that the smaller total capital employed, supposing on the one hand, the rate of surplus-value to remain unchanged, and, on the other, 10 of the original labourers to be working no longer, would absorb an amount of surplus-value of 450. But the rate of profit would not on this account be changed; or rather, just for this reason the rate of profit could not be altered and would be expressed by 450/900 (as at first 500/1000), _i.e._ it would be as at first, 50 per cent.