250 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES

In recent years, however, industrial wages [it stated] have
been higher, both absolutely and relatively to the cost of living,
 than ever before. In other words, a larger share of the
national income has been received by wage-earners and has
been translated to demand for consumers’ goods. It is concluded
 that this wider distribution of income has maintained
the balance between output and consumption of producers’
and consumers’ goods, and has thus prevented the development
 of the unsound conditions that ordinarily tend to transform
 prosperity into depression. . . .
But these large, and in some cases positively excessive,
plant capacities are at the same time an important element in
increasing overhead costs. In the effort to meet these costs,
producers attempt to maintain their sales volumes by every
practicable means, even at a heavy sacrifice of profit margins.
Earnings are further restricted by the enormous expenditures
for advertising and selling involved in such a campaign.
Thus, what is saved in unit costs of production is frequently
offset by the higher costs of distribution. This situation is
present, in a greater or less degree, in a surprizingly large
number of American industries, and is probably the chief
cause of the condition of “profitless prosperity” of which
increasingly frequent complaints have been heard in the last
few months.

Mr. Paul M. Mazur, who has published the most comprehensive
 and exhaustive study of the situation and its
implications, points out the “essential interdependence and
mutual antagonism” that prevail in the new industrial
revolution between mass production and distribution. He
briefly states the dangerous stage which has been reached,
as follows:

High-pressure distribution was made to create large sales
volume. It was and is the agency that harvested more and
more sales for the insatiable appetite of its creator—mass
production. High-pressure distribution produces sales volume;
 mass production requires that sales volume.