standards of living

• when too complicated or luxurious, speedily suicidal

68:6.7All down through the ages the stan­dards of liv­ing have de­ter­mined the qual­ity of a sur­viv­ing pop­u­la­tion in con­trast with mere quan­tity. Lo­cal class stan­dards of liv­ing give ori­gin to new so­cial castes, new mores. When stan­dards of liv­ing be­come too com­pli­cated or too highly lux­u­ri­ous, they speed­ily be­come sui­ci­dal. Caste is the di­rect re­sult of the high so­cial pres­sure of keen com­pe­ti­tion pro­duced by dense pop­u­la­tions.

• protected by tariffs on continental nation

72:7.91. Im­port du­ties. All im­ports are sub­ject to a tar­iff de­signed to pro­tect the stan­dard of liv­ing on this con­ti­nent, which is far above that of any other na­tion on the planet. These tar­iffs are set by the high­est in­dus­trial court af­ter both houses of the in­dus­trial congress have rat­i­fied the rec­om­men­da­tions of the chief ex­ec­u­tive of eco­nomic af­fairs, who is the joint ap­pointee of these two leg­isla­tive bod­ies. The up­per in­dus­trial house is elected by la­bor, the lower by cap­i­tal.

• slavery raised masters’

81:2.13The in­sti­tu­tions of slav­ery and pri­vate own­er­ship of land came with agri­cul­ture. Slav­ery raised the mas­ter’s stan­dard of liv­ing and pro­vided more leisure for so­cial cul­ture.

• man casts about to sweeten process of living

81:5.2Through agri­cul­ture, an­i­mal do­mes­ti­ca­tion, and im­proved ar­chi­tec­ture, man­kind grad­u­ally es­caped the worst of the in­ces­sant strug­gle to live and be­gan to cast about to find where­with to sweeten the pro­cess of liv­ing; and this was the be­gin­ning of the striv­ing for higher and ever higher stan­dards of ma­te­rial com­fort. Through man­u­fac­ture and in­dus­try man is grad­u­ally aug­ment­ing the plea­sure con­tent of mor­tal life.