But for nearly all of time, we could have only so much stuff. The materials we needed to make our stuff were harder to extract, and shaping our goods by hand took much longer. For example, it used to take a blacksmith one minute to forge a single nail. Nails were so scarce and valuable that arsonists would often burn down buildings just to steal nails. Today, modern nail-making machinery can crank out 360 nails in one minute.
