"Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right." - Kurt Herbert Alder

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"Until about forty years ago, many economists besides Marx believed that the capitalist process tended to change relative shares in the national total so that the obvious inference from our average might be invalidated by the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer, at least relatively. But there is no such tendency. Whatever may he thought of the statistical measures devised for the purpose. this much is certain: that the structure of the pyramid of incomes, expressed in terms of money, has not greatly changed during the period covered by our material—which for England includes the whole of the nineteenth century...

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses...

Verification is easy. There are no doubt some things available to the modern workman that Louis XIV himself would have been delighted to have modern dentistry for instance. On the whole, however, a budget on that level had little that really mattered to gain from capitalist achievement. Even speed of traveling may be assumed to have been a minor consideration for so very dignified a gentleman. Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has enough money to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."

--- Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy / Joseph Alois Schumpeter