Automation and valuing resources.

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Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow had Levin been struck by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side.

But by now he had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is said to happen to drunkards — the first glass sticks in the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like tiny little birds.

When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to pay for liveries for his footmen and hall-porter he could not help reflecting that these liveries were of no use to anyone — but they were indubitably necessary, to judge by the amazement of the princess and Kitty when he suggested that they might do without liveries — that these liveries would cost the wages of two laborers for the summer, that is, would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash Wednesday, and each a day of hard work from early morning to late evening — and that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat.

But the next note, changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations, that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats, which men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and thrashed and winnowed and sifted and sown — this next one he parted with more easily.

And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to the pleasure given by what was bought with it, was a consideration he had long ago dismissed.