Like the daily cooperation of living men, this cooperation of past, present and future is essential to the well-being of mankind, and yet it is undesigned and unorganized. As private individuals, men do, indeed, deliberately provide for their own future, and for that of their kith and kin: as the directors of businesses, they try to forecast the trend of demand. But such conscious calculations and deliberate acts would avail little if they stood alone. They are hardly more than the necessary spokes in the great wheel which regulates the relations of past, present and future. The hub of the wheel is an elaborate system of borrowing and lending, essentially similar to the buying and selling of commodities. The private individual in order to provide for his family or for his old age "saves" and "invests." But what exactly does this mean? It means that he transfers so much purchasing power, which he might have spent on his personal pleasures, to some one else in return for the expectation of receiving, year by year in the future, he and his heirs after him, a certain smaller quantity of purchasing power. The other party to the transaction will be, we may suppose, a business man who enters into it because he sees the opportunity of a promising industrial development, to undertake which he requires more purchasing power than he himself possesses. And, because this transaction is entered into, a smaller number of us will shortly be engaged in making motorcars, or gramaphones, and a larger number of us in making factories and machinery, which will later enhance the world's productive power.