[Sidenote: Saving permits improvement of agents] 1. _The individual saver is enabled to improve the agents that he uses._ The simplest case is presented when means of enjoyment are improved and made more durable. If Crusoe on his island spends less time and fewer resources on gratifying his immediate wants, he may improve the quality of his clothing and the convenience of his house and furniture. By thus putting his consumption goods into durable instead of temporary forms, he will increase eventually the sum of utilities enjoyed. Again, abstinence permits the tools of the laborer to be made more convenient. If the farmer spends less time in the garden and he and his family live on plainer food, while he makes a plow, mends a rake, and builds a shed, he will be enabled thereafter to gather a greater crop with less effort. [Sidenote: Saving of consumption goods for exchange] 2. _Consumption goods, when saved, may be exchanged for services, and these may be used to create durable agents._ Various ways are open to one wishing to increase his stock of durable agents. He may forego seeking immediate enjoyments while he makes durable agents himself. Or he may make and save a stock of consumption goods, a surplus supply for the future, and exchange it for durable agents. Finally, one who has accumulated consumption goods can always exchange them for the services of those seeking subsistence and enjoyment; and thus in control of a labor force, he can direct it toward the production of new forms of productive agents. [Sidenote: Money savings are converted into other wealth] 3. _In modern industry, saving frequently takes the form of money, which is then loaned to productive borrowers._ This is the typical form of saving in modern industry. As it is more and more the case that income takes first the form of money, saving most conveniently takes the money form. The clerk on a salary of $60 a month spends $50 and saves $10 which he lends to a neighbor or deposits in a savings-bank. The borrower is thus empowered to increase his stock of productive agents in the measure that the lender has limited his consumption. The complexity of the process by which money saving becomes embodied through a money loan in new productive agents should not blind to its real nature. The money is saved as a means to the exchange of present goods for future income. Money even in our day is occasionally stored away for future use under hearthstones or in old stockings and hollow trees, but this is a primitive and wasteful method, involving the loss of all the additional rents that its exchange and investment would yield.