TECHNOLOGY

general, it may be said that any improvement in man's ability to
control over his physical and biological habitats permits an increase in the
numbers of the group, a rise in their standard of living, or both. His-
torically, the new techniques have led to a tremendous increase in pop-
ulation numbers in Western societies and, within recent years, to such
effective checks upon numbers that the general standard of living has
risen very much above the level of mere subsistence.

The Standard of Living and Technology.—The way in which improve-
ments in technology make possible a rise in the standard of living is clear
enough. Less apparent is the consequence of a given standard of living
upon the technology. The point has already been made that, contrary to
popular belief, a low standard of living does not encourage improvements
in technology—z>., that "necessity" is not the mother of invention. A
higher-than-subsistence standard of living may, on the other hand, stim-
ulate efforts to improve techniques, if other factors, such as the existing
level of the arts, the ideologies, and the organizational structures, are
favorable to such endeavor. These conditions have frequently obtained
in Western societies during the past two centuries; and as a consequence
there has been a marked tendency for new techniques to make their ap-
pearance where they have been least rather than most "necessary," i.e.,
among those who already have the highest standards of living. In the
terms of the economist, cheap labor has been a deterrent to technological
advance, whereas costly labor has encouraged the simplification and
mechanization of productive processes.

During the past century or two those Western countries that have
had the lowest standards of living—and the most cheap labor—have been
slowest to adopt new techniques, and those aspects of the domestic econ-
omy in which there was the most abundant labor supply have been the
slowest to become mechanized. In England, for example, where until
very recently there was an excess of agricultural labor (in part because
of the decline of agricultural activities and the reluctance of the agri-
cultural worker to shift into industrial occupations), there has been little
mechanization of agricultural techniques. A similar condition has existed
in our own Southern states, where the abundance of cheap, tenant farm
workers and an antiquated system of property ownership and manage-
ment have for long retarded the introduction of laborsaving machinery,
modern cultivation techniques, and new crops. But in the Middle West
and especially in the Far West the scarcity of labor in terms of the avail-
able cultivatable land has served to encourage the development and ap-
plication of agricultural machinery, of the most modern cultivation
techniques, and of crops appropriate to large-scale, industrial-type fann-
ing. The mechanical reaper was developed in and for the Middle West