2. Fertility, including those qualities of the earth that are useful to man in the pursuit of his economic activities.
3. Power, including those forces of nature which man may harness and compel to do his bidding.
Climate, fertility and power are variously distributed over the earth. The heat near the equator and the cold of the arctic regions make any highly organized forms of economic life difficult. Consequently it is in the temperate zones that industrial civilizations have developed. The deposits of minerals and fuels are quite uneven. Take iron as an example. The available deposits of iron ore are concentrated mainly in Brazil, Cuba, the Appalachians and the Great Lake Basin, so that the Americas and particularly North America have far more than a proportionate share of the iron ore supply. Copper, coal and petroleum are distributed with even greater irregularity. Equally uneven is soil fertility. Beside a garden spot, like the Mississippi Valley, lies a great Colorado-Utah desert. Nature has provided those requisites upon which man must depend for his economic life. They are scattered it is true, and with the present political barriers holding peoples apart, many of them are politically unavailable but, economically, they are an open door to the future.
Men have met with considerable success in availing themselves of nature's bounty, and of converting it into useful and pleasing forms. All of the tools, weapons, textiles, metals, wheels, machines, have been the result of human effort and ingenuity, spread over long periods of time, and gradually accumulated and concentrated. At last a day seems to have dawned when machinery, applied to nature's bounty, could produce the wealth necessary to support the world's existing population on a minimum standard of living. Certainly the energy and wealth which went into the five war years would have fed and clothed the people for that period.
8. Distribution and the Social Revolution
Men have succeeded in kindling fires, making wheels, separating the metal from the ore, harnessing electrical power and communicating their thoughts to one another and to their descendants, but they have not made themselves masters of those forces which work through fire and wheels. Men have met the immediate economic problem by devising methods for producing food, clothes and roof-trees, but they have been overwhelmed by the social implications of these productive forces. Before the problem of sharing the proceeds of their labor, they have stopped, and the whole economic progress of the race now stands like an engine stalled, awaiting some solution of the problems of distribution.
Through the ages various methods of making a living were inaugurated successively. Medieval Europe had worked out a combination of herding, agriculture, craft industry and trade that made a stable life for an agricultural village a practical possibility.
This period of economic stability—this golden age—was followed by a series of events that threw the fat into the fire. First in England, and then in all of the important countries of Europe, the industrial revolution turned the simple grazing, farming, craft-industry life of the village topsy-turvy, by providing a new method of converting nature's bounty into goods and services calculated to meet the increasing needs and wants of mankind. So far-reaching was the change that it has compelled a reorganization of virtually all phases of social life, but for the present purpose, it has been felt chiefly in four fields: manufacturing, commerce, wealth-surplus and population.
The efficiency of the new manufacturing processes has provided a large surplus of goods that must be taken somewhere, exchanged for food and raw materials, which must, in turn, be brought to the producers of manufactured goods. In the course of these transactions, a generous share of the values produced goes, in the form of profit, to the owners of the industry, another considerable portion goes into reinvestment, thus swelling the volume of productive capital.
The increased wealth, the larger capital and the greater amount of surplus all make possible the maintenance of a larger population. Thus it has come about during the past century, that the production of goods, the transport of goods, and the population, have all been increasing at a rate unheard of during the previous thousand years.