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| 396 | “scientia„ |
as to foresight, self-control, etc., will have the same marginal rates of impatience. This adjustment of the impatience of different individuals takes place, as we have seen, by adjusting their respective incomes, increasing their immediate income at the expense of future income or increasing their future income at the expense of immediate income. These changes in income we have supposed, for illustration, to be effected by borrowing and lending. As a matter of fact they may also take place in two other ways. One way is by buying and selling property. If a man buys property like a growing forest, which will bring him remotely future income and sells property, like household furniture, or short-time notes which brings him more immediate income it is clear that he can profoundly change the character of his present and future income. The other way is by changing the uses to which he puts his capital, e. g. changing the use of land from growing immediate crops to growing timber in the remote future. But whether he modifies this income by borrowing and lending, or by buying and selling, or by changing the uses of his capital, the essential point is that he does modify its time-shape and by so doing raises or lowers his rate of impatience so as to make it agree with the market rate of interest. For the individual the rate of interest is a relatively fixed fact, since his own rate of impatience and resulting action can affect it only infinitesimally. All he can do is to adjust his rate of impatience to it. For society as a whole, however, it is these same rates of impatience which meet in, and determine, the rate of interest. While for the individual the rate of interest determines the rate of impatience, for society the rates of impatience of the individuals determine the rate of interest. The rate of interest is simply the rate of impatience, upon which the whole community may concur in order that the market of loans may be exactly cleared. Supply and demand will work this out.
To put the matter in figures: if the rate of interest is set very high, say 20 per cent, there will be relatively few borrowers and many would-be lenders, so that the total extent to which would-be lenders are willing to reduce their income-streams for the present year for the sake of a much larger future income will be, say 100,000,000 of dollars; whereas, those who are willing to add to their present income at the
