Quite the achievement.....................

It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabrics, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a 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 the queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily declining amounts of effort....in other words, that the capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.

-Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy