Okay, good morning everyone. Today we have the exciting topic,
a little broach exciting topic of capital interest and the structure of production.
Just a thing to wake everyone up.
Let me start by noting that we've already mentioned that all production takes time.
In fact, all action takes time.
Time is what really differentiates human beings from beasts.
Human beings use time as a means to improve their welfare,
As we'll see, because time is essential to production.
Beasts, on the other hand, experience time as duration.
Humans do things, beasts endure things.
We use time as a tool.
And we talked a little bit about the law of time preference.
And let me just recap very quickly.
According to the universal law of time preference, in fact, individuals prefer to achieve their
Their goal sooner rather than later. All other things equal. Their value scales, their future
incomes and so on. That's not to say, and we'll get to this a little bit later, that
someone will not save for no return in the future. In fact, that will happen. If someone
believes, in fact I had a little exchange with Brian Kaplan on the Mises list, if there's
There's a human being on an island, isolated alone on an island, and he has a stock of durable goods.
And let's say he's very, very long-lived, that is, that the span of his life is not a question here.
The key point to be made is that, yes indeed, he will not consume all the durable good today or even this year.
He will spread that consumption over time, but in fact he will satisfy more of his wants today than he would, let's say, 50 years from now.
In other words, he will allocate, because of time preference, units of the good maybe to his first 100 wants on his value scale.
But the 100th want today, assuming his wants don't change over time, will be more important to him than, let's say, the 10th want 50 years from now.
So he might only save 10 units of goods for 50 years from now, consume 100 units today.
And what will happen over time to these durable goods is that eventually they'll run out, and he'll pass from the scene.
That is, he will not continually postpone action so that those goods last for infinity.
The wants today, or the satisfaction of those wants today, are more important to him, all other things equal, than wants in the future.
Another way of saying that, of course, is that people prefer their satisfaction today to the same satisfaction at some time in the remote future.
Or they prefer a given sum of money today to the same sum of money in the future, all other things equal.
And this really explains the loan market, how interest rates and why interest rates exist on a market for loans.
Let's perform a mental experiment. Let's say that despite my lineage and the fact that I'm from New Jersey, you trust me implicitly.
And that is to say, if you made a loan to me, you fully believe that I will pay that loan back one year from now.
So let's say I solicit people to loan me $10,000 and I will pay you back one year from now $10,000.
$10,000. Would you make that loan? Assuming no default risk. You don't anticipate any default risk on my part or me just running off with the money and never returning.
Of course you wouldn't. You would have to be bribed in some sense to overcome your time preference. The fact that during that year you would have to abstain from consumption, from spending that $10,000 on consumption.
There is an opportunity cost then to making that loan to me.
And that opportunity cost is the disutility of waiting for consumption, for this money which you will then spend on consumption.
So now, if I offer $11,000 future dollars, that is to pay you back $10,000 in principal plus $1,000 in interest a year from now,
then you may very well make me the loan.
And I could continue to raise that interest premium to the point where almost everybody in this room would be willing to make me a loan.
Even the most high time preference person like Peter, maybe if I promised him $20,000 for that $10,000 loan, he would make the loan.
So, in effect, what we have here is just simply a voluntary exchange.
The method of separating a principal from the interest payment more or less beclouds the issue, okay?
Really what's being exchanged is the sum of future money, total sum of future money for total sum of present money.
And because present dollars are worth more as a result of time preference than future dollars, I must promise or I must pay you,
to give you an IOU for more of those less valuable future dollars
in order to get you to part with the more valuable present dollars.
So in the case of a loan transaction, we have the borrower, we have the lender,
and the borrower prefers the $10,000 in the present,
I'll put P here and that's, let's say, today,
to $11,000 in the future, meaning he is willing, fully willing to give up $11,000 in the future
To obtain $10,000 today, he ranks the $10,000 present above the $11,000 future dollars.
The lender ranks them in opposite order. That is, the lender, if he does make the loan, prefers the $11,000 IOU, or future dollars, in the form of an IOU, a promise to pay, to the $10,000 of present money.
So, each person benefits from the exchange.
They both improve their welfare in the sense that they move from a lower-ranked good to a higher-ranked good.
This is a very powerful analysis.
This allows us to shed light on a number of vexing issues, which I'll get to in a moment.
But the key here is to recognize that the $10,000 today is worth more to the borrower than the $11,000 he's willing to pay for that at some point in the future.
The interest is just a formality. That is, we call it the additional premium on the additional $1,000, which is the premium on present money.
We call that the interest, and then we can do an arithmetical operation and we say that the interest is 10%, because I'm paying you back $10,000 or $1,000, $1,000 more future dollars.
And some people have denied that time preference exists.
They've come up with a supposed counterexamples, very early on when Boehm-Bawerk introduced this notion of time preference.
The first economist to really make it an essential part of his system.
He entertained objections such as, well, what about the case in which someone picks 20 pints of fresh blueberries
One month from now, and ten rotten pints of blueberries, one month from now.
So by giving up those ten pints of blueberries, they're not the same good.
If he kept them in his possession, stored them, they'd be rotten one month from now.
So he's really comparing rotten blueberries to fresh blueberries.
And he prefers the five pints of fresh blueberries to the ten pints of rotten blueberries.
And then there's the old example of ice in winter and ice in summer. If someone were given a choice, and let's say it's the middle of January, and this is before the era of refrigeration, and they were given a choice to get a delivery today of ice in the middle of January, or to take delivery in July of the same quantity of ice, they would take it in July.
So doesn't that, in a sense, counter time preference, that action, doesn't contradict the universal law of time preference?
Of course not. Again, they're different goods. Ice in the winter is much less desirable than ice in the summer, if you don't have a refrigerator.
So, almost all counter examples can be shown to confuse two different goods, ice in winter, ice in summer, or rotten blueberries and fresh blueberries.
Now, time preference differs between different people and over time for the same person.
Let me give you some examples.
Children have notoriously high time preferences.
We say high time preferences.
What we're referring to is someone who puts a big premium on present satisfaction.
Someone with a low time preference is someone who is more willing or relatively more willing to wait for their satisfactions.
So what would the children want? Children want things right away.
When my son was three or four years old, we used to go to a local diner and in the entryway to the diner there was a video game machine.
commitment to voluntary exchange, overrode his time preference, dragged him to the table and only gave him one quarter when he came back when we were ready to play.
So children tend to have high time preferences. But part of the maturation process for a human being is that their time preferences become lower.
They take more thought for the future. They're more willing to save. And so their time preferences fall.
They never fall to zero, obviously. People, because they act, are always pulling their goals closer to them.
Anytime you embark on action, as I mentioned, you pull your goals closer.
You still want things sooner rather than later, which is that you put a lower premium on having things sooner.
Now, as people tend to age, as they become older, we have a phenomenon sometimes called a second childhood,
to all the people who begin going on cruises and spending money on sports cars that they never would have purchased and enjoying their lives.
So people who are outside observers will say, oh, they're in a second childhood.
Well, no, the fact is as they get older and have fewer, less time left to enjoy goods and services, they're going to begin to have higher time preferences.
So, over time, there's a sort of a cycle of time, a normal cycle of time preferences.
Also, outside events can affect people's time preferences.
Let's say that we have that scenario from the movie Deep Impact, was it?
I think it was called, where there was a meteor that was going to smash into the Earth,
and the Earth would effectively, or all human life on the Earth would be effectively wiped out.
And let's say that there was good scientific evidence that this would occur in a year.
And let's say this was revealed in the paper, let's say tomorrow morning.
What would happen the next morning? What would you see on the front page of the business section?
Interest rates skyrocket. Okay?
No one will make anything more than a one-year loan, and even making very short-term loans, people will demand high interest rates.
because they want to, they're moving all their satisfactions into the present, okay, because there is no future or there's not much of a future, okay, and there is none after one year and so time preference will skyrocket, interest rates will skyrocket, as we'll see is a positive relationship between interest rates and time preference, okay, time preference being a causal factor, interest rates being the result of changes in time preferences. Now on the other hand, let's say that there's
an elixir that's discovered by medical researchers that will prolong the average human life, double it, to 150 years.
What will happen to interest rates? They'll drop. People will have more of a future to provide for.
So what you will see is more saving lower interest rates. People have lower time preferences.
Because there are more wants now in the future that they want to satisfy.
Once again, it won't drop to zero.
Now, time preferences are reflected in what we call the consumption-saving ratio.
The higher that ratio is, that is, the greater proportion of your income you devote to consumption versus saving, the higher your time preference is.
So if there's a young couple that gets married and their income is, let's say, a combined income is $1,000 a week or something, or whatever, let's say $2,000 a week.
They may very well spend $1,800 on consumption, so this is C, and put $200 aside per week.
That's a 9 to 1 ratio.
Now, the wife becomes pregnant and their time preferences fall as they begin to think about the four or five hundred thousand dollars of college tuition they're going to have to pay in eighteen years.
And the other stream of expenditures they're going to have to make now for the child over time as the child grows.
So this might very well fall to, let's say, fifteen hundred to five hundred.
So, what's going to happen is savings is going to increase, consumption is going to decrease, and you're going to find that the ratio is going to decline.
Less is going to be devoted to consumption, more is going to be devoted to saving as time preferences come down.
So, we're not saying that people are somehow prisoners of their time preference.
Their time preferences are really embedded in their value scales, and those value scales can change from moment to moment.
So not only do they rank different goods on their value scale, they rank goods at different periods of time on their value scale.
There really is, at any given moment when you're allocating resources, there's one value scale that includes all your present wants and all your known or anticipated future wants.
And the way you allocate your income is going to determine what your consumption-saving ratio is.
is not a part of your subjective valuation process that's somehow separate it is not okay that's important let me get some issues before we get to production and those issues are have to do with first the attack on on on the payday lending
These are some issues before we get to production.
And those issues have to do with first the attack on the payday lending industry.
Does everyone know what payday lending is?
What payday lending is, generally it occurs for people with low incomes.
What happens is that those people will go in and get an advance on their next paycheck.
It's usually a two-week advance.
So for example, if they want a $200 advance or loan, typically as I said, a two-week loan,
it could be a one-week loan, what they'll do is they'll write out a post-dated check
to the payday lender for a greater sum of future dollars two weeks from now.
And so they'll write out a $250 check that will be cashed when they get their paycheck
two weeks from now.
It will be dated two weeks from now and the lender will hold that check and give them
$200 in return.
Now this tends to, the interest rates tend to be by our standards, astronomical.
It's usually $15 or $20 per $100 borrowed, but that's only a two-week loan.
And so, for example, they give, in North Carolina, there was a study, the median payday loan fee in North Carolina is $36,
and the median two-week loan is $244. So here's what happens.
It's a loan like any other type of loan, so you have the borrower, then you have the payday lender.
And what you get is the borrower getting $244 in the present.
In exchange, they have to pay a $36 premium, so that's $280.
They promise to pay $280 back, and that promise is in the form of a post-dated check two weeks from now.
The exchange takes place from now. The payday lender gives up the $244, the present money, and receives a $280 post-dated check. That's the IOU.
And the exchange takes place. Both expect the benefit from this.
Now, I mentioned before that when we separate out the interest rate, which we do for purposes of analysis,
this is the essence of what happens. We separate out the interest rate and we figure out what it is, $36 on $244 for two weeks.
Does anyone want to venture a guess on what it is per annum or per year?
It's 419% per year, okay. So people look at the interest rate. Activists look at the interest rate and they say, this is exploitative. They're exploiting this poor person's need, okay.
There's a number of, well the first response to that is the person who takes the payday loan isn't stupid.
He's going to or she's going to find the lender that will lend to them at the lowest possible rate.
So you're focusing on the wrong person when you blame this person for making the loan.
And secondly, the borrower is benefiting. They prefer the $244 today to the $280 two weeks from now. It's simply a voluntary exchange.
But when you restate it as it's a 419% interest rate, that's usury, that's exploitation, that's gouging, price gouging, interest gouging.
The second critique, criticism, is that this is also called predatory lending, by the way.
This is predatory lending because if the customer can't pay, he doesn't have sufficient funds to pay,
they allow him to roll that loan over, to write another check, post-date another two weeks, for another 419%.
And so somehow then this is increasing, intensifying the exploitation, but of course, do we have to pay off our credit cards which have relatively high interest rates?
No, we don't. This argument could be used against credit card lending. It's predatory because you're allowed to roll it over.
You don't have to pay it off every month.
So there's a little touch of sort of a condescension on the part of the people that are making this critique.
Middle class people and upper class people who go into debt on their credit cards in many cases in a way that they regret later on,
They're not asking government to regulate their credit cards. They're asking them to regulate the loan market for the poor.
So the poor are poor. They're not stupid. That's the key point. They will shop around for the lowest cost loan.
Now, let me get to another criticism. What you must keep in mind is that there's been a study that's shown that payday borrowers are more likely to have poor credit histories
Histories have worked with credit counselors in the past and are more
likely to have one or more bounce checks in the previous five years so they are
high credit risks so that's not a pure interest rate part of that is a risk
premium but secondly there's a very high overhead cost okay for making loans if
the hundred thousand dollar loan it's relatively small but if it's a very
small loan those high overhead costs don't they don't change much okay so
So, part of it is not even an interest rate, part of that extra $36, part of it is the cost of administering that small loan.
And part of it, of course, is the risk premium for the inevitable defaults that occur.
The bottom line is those who criticize this lending are making a judgment on people's time preferences.
They're saying they don't believe that it's immoral or it's wrong for the borrower to have these high time preferences,
to be willing to pay such a high premium for having present goods.
Another point to be made is that, or another critique, is that, well, the payday lender does not, well, by the fact that it exists, it turns people into habitual borrowers.
But once again, that can be expanded to saying, well, the fact that we can get credit cards, that we've had credit cards offered after World War II, they became so widespread,
that that may turn the middle class or upper-income people into habitual borrowers.
No, what it does is to give people a choice to either pay today or to only purchase within the income that you're earning today
or to borrow and be able to purchase things and enjoy them now and not have to wait for them in the future.
I mean, that's exactly what a mortgage loan is.
There weren't any mortgage loans before the 1930s in the United States.
People saved up and they paid for their house.
They saved up 10, 20 years and they finally got a house 20 years later.
Now the mortgage market allows us to anticipate our future income
and to get that house now and to enjoy it for 20 years.
But for that enjoyment we are paying an interest rate.
Same thing is true with poor people.
Finally, one point we made here, the payday lending industry has been totally created by government regulations.
Most states have usury laws. That is, they cap interest rates at certain levels.
I saw a figure, it could be as low as 20% or as high as 300% in some states, but there are caps.
This is a way of getting around that. These, in Walter Block's terms, these are our heroes, because they are getting around that loophole, because they don't state it as an interest rate, they simply state it as a payday loan, and you just write a check to them, so there's no formal interest rates stated.
more reputable and lower-cost lenders would be able to lend, maybe a bank would lend in a state where it's 100% it's a cap, they might lend this guy at 120% instead of 419%, because their costs will be lower and they can spread the risks more, okay, because they'd have a bigger clientele, but they're not permitted to, so these people, the payday lenders are those who stand between a poor person and the illegal loan shark, okay, they're the last resort before illegal lenders
Legal Loans. So now am I saying payday lending is good or bad? No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying from the point of view of poor people, given the situation, given government
regulations, they are benefiting just as much as the payday, not in a measurable sense,
but just like the payday lender is benefiting. And I think payday lending is a great innovation
of the Market.
Let me get to one other issue in the loan market, and that is so-called toxic mortgages.
And there's a Center for Responsible Lending, and there's a Center for Irresponsible Language.
Toxic mortgages, it's a pejorative term, obviously.
You can immediately load the dice against people that make sub-prime loans, institutions that make sub-prime loans, sub-prime mortgage loans to, again, people with low incomes or people with bad credit records.
But now they're complaining that they're making these loans.
If you recall about, I think in the late 1980s, there was, and even before that in the 70s, there was a phenomenon called redlining in the United States.
Redlining meant that banks, I don't have a red pen here, what if I do, that what banks would do in the mortgage market in a city, okay, let's say you have a city here, let's say it's Philadelphia.
North Philadelphia is notorious for the crime and the arson and murders and so on.
What they would do is say, you know what, we don't trust the people in this area.
It's a mainly black area. We don't trust the people in this area to pay back.
Now, they're making a legitimate business decision. They're not doing business, they're racist.
They're just saying that, you know, we're grouping these people all together.
It's very difficult for us to tell the difference between them as far as their credit histories and so on.
So we're going to draw a red line and we're going to say, no one gets mortgage loans in that area.
So there was a big outcry, this criticism of banks for doing this.
The Federal Reserve changed regulations or regulated lending to the extent that they forced lending into these areas.
Now the exact opposite is happening.
Now, they're complaining that they're making too many loans or loans that are toxic, that these poor people are victimized by.
And we'll get to why these loans are occurring.
Again, it's a problem, part of it is due to the government-inspired or stimulated boom, housing boom that we've had.
But let me just say a few words about the so-called toxic mortgages.
There's a number of different types. There's the simple adjustable rate mortgage, which has low teaser rates.
Sometimes they're called 2 slash 28s, which means the first two years you pay very, very low rates.
And then the last 28 years, you're subject to having those rates adjusted as interest rates change.
There's also 100% financing where people don't have to put down any down payment.
There's also interest only loans where people almost never pay off their equity.
That is, the minimum payment is the amount of the interest.
So it's called the no equity loan.
So if someone sells their house, they don't have any equity in that house.
The most toxic one is the negative equity loan, where the minimum payment is actually less than the interest rate, so if you buy a $180,000 house and you're only making the minimum payment, the amount you owe is increasing, okay, every year, it's actually going up, you're building up negative equity, that's called a negative equity loan.
The amount you owe is increasing every year. It's actually going up. You're building up negative equity.
That's called an option adjustable rate mortgage.
So it provides you with options of either paying at least the interest or even more than that, or paying actually less, but at least the minimum payment, which is lower than the interest rate.
So, in fact, I just heard today on NPR, coming here, that the Fed is meeting today to make decisions about regulating the subprime loan market.
And the Center for Responsible Lending had a speaker on there talking about all the negatives of the subprime lending.
But, of course, now, what they're not telling you is that many young couples, many poor people, are simply not going to get houses.
They're not going to be able to afford homes. They're going to have to live in apartments and so on.
once again it's a question of people's time preference
okay they're willing to go into this debt because maybe they believe that their
income is going to go up
over time sufficiently to meet the higher interest payments
or sufficiently to make more than the minimum payments
on
and they
make mistakes okay they're not saying that everyone in the subprime market
is defaulting on their loans but the defaults have increased in the last year or two
as interest rates have climbed
The key, of course, though, is that Americans, since 1995, have believed that housing prices were going to continue to increase.
So that if that happened, then you can sell your house if you can't make the payments, and you will have enough to pay off the mortgage.
So once again, they're closing off choice by people with higher time preferences to exercise those high time preferences, to pay the higher interest rates.
And you can go on, it's very interesting to go on to the website, which I just looked at briefly this morning, of the Center for Responsible Lending.
Predatory Lending
The most important determinant of the interest rate in the capitalist economy is what we call the production structure.
As I said before, production takes time and it proceeds in stages.
So let me just give you a visual example of that.
For example, the production of shoes.
If you wanted to produce shoes from scratch, it would take you a substantial amount of time.
You'd have to actually have the cattle, and then if the cattle were slaughtered, then you'd go into the next stage, which we call the higher stage, or the higher order, as Peter talked about yesterday.
So highs are higher order good, that is the animal skins, and then you would have to tan them and so on and go through a process of turning them into leather in the next stage, and that would take a certain amount of time.
And then you could assemble the shoes from that and from other materials.
In each stage you would of course need land and labor as well as these capital goods.
So the hides, the leather and so on are intermediate or capital goods that are being created in this production process.
And then they would be turned into shoes and then you would have to combine the shoes with various distribution services, transportation and so on to get them to the retailers
and then they would be sold to consumers at the end of the process.
Or if this is a Robinson Crusoe making his own shoes,
he would then employ the shoes himself for his own consumption.
Now, in a capitalist economy, all goods are produced under the Division of Labor and Specialization
in an extremely time-consuming fashion, in which there are many stages of production.
Now, what is the, let me step back for a moment.
The criticism of the capitalists, which began with Marx, actually before Marx, was this.
The capitalist is someone who simply invests money in a firm.
We're not talking about a manager.
Let's assume the capitalist simply invests money in a firm,
And then at the end of the year, somehow, let's say he's invested $100,000, the product is sold for $120,000, he receives the extra $20,000, and he's seemingly done nothing, okay?
Why do we need a capitalist? Okay, what is the function of the capitalist?
Mark said it was nut-nut, there wasn't any, that he was just extracting surplus from the workers.
He was paying them enough to reproduce themselves in some sense, to reproduce their labor, and seizing the surplus.
Well, in fact, let's think of trying to produce an automobile from scratch.
You would need mining tools, so there's a group of people, they have the knowledge, they have the technology,
and so on, and they're going to produce, let's say, through a cooperative effort, let's say a producer's cooperative.
So what they'll do then is, somehow they're going to have to save up in advance enough food and enough clothing and so on to see them through the production process.
Let's say it's going to take seven years from the beginning.
And they have the mine, so they own the mine and so on.
So what they do then is they combine the original labor with the mine.
They have to make some tools and then they mine the iron ore.
Then they have to, from the iron ore, they have to transform that into steel, so they have to produce, again, themselves, you know, the steel plant, steel machinery, and then process the iron ore, turn it into steel, and then an auto assembly plant and machinery, assemble the automobile, and then seven years later, they sell the stock of automobiles for, let's say, one million dollars, and they split it amongst themselves. The key is,
In order to do that, without starving in the process, they had to save in advance.
They had to postpone consumption, to save up the goods necessary to get them through,
to maintain them during the lengthy production process.
Well, this is what the capitalist does. This is the capitalist's function.
The capitalist is the one who abstains from present consumption, pays the workers every two weeks,
provides the consumption, pays the workers every two weeks, even though the product is not going to emerge onto the market for another three months, a year or five years, whatever the production process is, and then at the end, reaps a premium.
Now, let's assume a perfect certainty. We're assuming that he's not bearing any burden of loss. All he's doing is postponing consumption to the future.
He perfectly knows, everyone knows what the price will be for automobiles in the future.
Now because of the returns to, excuse me, specialization and the division of labor, the greater efficiency of specialization,
you don't even have one set of capitalists, which we call a firm, producing any good in today's world from beginning to end.
What they do, rather, is produce one stage, or even a part of a stage.
The firms will produce, maybe you have mining firms, then you have steel plants and steel firms, and you have auto assembly plants, GM and Ford.
So they're separate. Each set of capitalists then wait for their income during a period in which production is taking place.
They pay the workers either in advance or every two weeks. The workers get paid.
At the end of the process, the workers, in exchange for getting paid every two weeks before the product comes onto the market,
the workers give up the ownership of the capital good, and let me put another sample up here.
They give up the ownership of, let's say, the wheat, in this case we're talking about bread, and the flour.
in exchange for present money.
So that's the exchange that takes place.
It's very, very similar to the exchange that takes place on the loan market.
So what you have is the following, you have the laborers and you have the capitalists.
Okay, and the laborers, let's say, in total give up, say, the control of or the ownership of, let's say, the wheat.
In return, they get a certain sum of money, they get wages.
Okay, that's present money.
The capitalist gives up the present money, in exchange the capitalist gets the wheat, wheat goes to the capitalist, present money, so present money here, which we call wages when it's paid to labor, goes to the laborers, okay, they both are better off.
Now why would the capitalist can't eat all that wheat, why would the capitalist want the wheat? Right, the capitalist doesn't want the wheat for his own consumption, okay, or he wants maybe only a very small part of it.
What he wanted for is to sell it on the market in exchange for money, so what he sees in the wheat is not the wheat itself, it's the expectation of future income.
That's what he gets from ownership of the capital goods, so each day as the wheat progresses towards being finished and ready for sale on the market, he has an expectation of future money.
So it's no different than an exchange on the loan market. It's present money basically for future money, wages for the capital good.
Now to produce any good you must have a structure of production.
Now, so let's just sum up the capitalist function. The capitalist function is to assume the burden of waiting for income from factors.
The interest is the difference between the sum of the factor payments, let's just talk about labor, the sum of the wage that he pays to the laborers, and the total revenue that he gets from the sale of the automobile.
So let me show you how this might work in a multi-stage production process.
Okay, let me just make this a little bit smaller.
Okay, for the time being that's, this is our sort of, this is the production of a particular good, but it also could be expanded to the entire economy, we can call it the structure of production for the whole economy, but for the moment let's just look at it for one good, let's say that in the highest stage, so we call it the fourth stage, what happens, the capitalist
If you let me direct your attention to the capital space, $10, $10 million, $10,000, whatever it is, the capitalist pays $10 in the fourth stage.
It's not working.
So the capitalist pays $10 to the laborers.
The laborers then work for the capitalist in that fourth stage in producing some capital good.
At the end of that stage, the capitalist then is able to sell the capital good for $11.
Now he gets a premium of $1 which is about 10%.
So in the left column here is his interest.
He earns $1 in the production process, laborers earn $10.
Why did he earn that $1?
He didn't do anything.
Let's assume he hired the managers and they oversaw the assembly line workers and the
The managers got paid and so on. All he did was pay wages in advance. Well, that's what he did. He paid wages in advance.
He overcame his own time preference. He abstained from consumption, renounced consumption for a full year.
In exchange, he gave $10 up and got $11 a year later.
The capital good is then sold to the third stage capitalist or firm. It's sold for $11, but they need workers to work on that capital good to turn it into a lower order capital good, a capital good that's closer to the consumers.
So what happens is that they pay $11 in wages, they pay $9 in wages, $11 for the capital good, they lay out $20.
At the end of that stage, they sell the capital good for $22 and receive an interest return of $2, which again is about 10%.
As we'll see, there's a tendency in the market economy for the interest rate, the pure interest rate, to be equalized in every process of production and over all stages of production.
The Capitalists own it at the end and they sell for $55. The capitalist then gets $5 in interest, which again is 10%. $50 was invested, part of which went to the workers, the other part went to the third stage capitalists.
Okay, there's a few things I want to point out here. Now, finally, obviously, in the first stage, or the consumer goods stage, the capital good is sold for $55.
Let's say this is the automobile industry, okay? So the steel and so on is sold for $55, and all the parts.
And the last stage is the assembly of the automobile, and workers are hired in the assembly class for $45 that are invested in wages.
So for $100 then of investment, the capitalists at the end, when they sell the final good to consumers a year later, they sell for $110 and they get a $10 interest payment or return.
They get the difference then. So the interest rate in the structure of production is the price spreads, the rate of price spreads.
The ratio of what you receive over and above what you've paid out, divided by the amount that you've invested, the total amount that you've invested.
Once again, we can sort of sum this up here. If this is the economy as a whole, what has happened is that consumption was $110, saving an investment, if you look at the investment in every stage,
The amount that capitalists laid out in every stage, from the first to the fourth, that comes to $180.
The total spending then in the economy was the consumption plus the investment.
So $110 was spent by consumers, $180 by capitalists to give us $290.
And we can see what the ratio was. The consumption saving ratio was C slash S.
That is $180 was saved in the economy, $110 was consumed.
What's interesting is that if you want to keep your structural production permanent,
and we'll talk a little bit about Robson Crusoe to make this a little bit more concrete for you,
what you have to do is you have to abstain from spending.
The capitalists cannot spend any of that $180 for their own consumption.
They can only spend it on capital goods.
Otherwise, what will happen is that the structural production will become shorter
and the economy will become less productive.
So what happens is the workers spend all $92 on goods,
the goods that are produced in the economy,
and the capitalists can only spend $18 on goods, only the interest return.
The other money that they receive in production has to be what?
Reinvested if the economy is to reproduce the same goods in the next period.
Let me say a few other things here.
These are the rents that Peter talked about, the capital goods in the second and fourth stage.
$55 was paid for the capital good in the first stage.
$22 in the second stage, and in the third stage $11 was paid for capital goods.
And that gave us $88. We see some consumer goods of $110.
I don't want to go into too much more detail here, but you see the point.
Good point. What if in the next period, when the capitalist received, let's say, the $55 in that second stage, when he sold the good for $55, what if he spent the whole amount on consumption and didn't reinvest in buying the capital good from the second stage and didn't pay the laborers?
What would happen to the amount of goods in the economy eventually? They would go down.
What if every capitalist stopped investing and everybody spent their money on consumer goods?
Well, what would happen, exactly, in a very short time, the amount of consumer goods would dry up and people would be eating hand to mouth and many of them would starve.
Now, that's all very abstract and again, it's just a diagrammatic representation of what happens in the economy.
There's a lot of complexity here.
As Peter pointed out, you would use trucks in the fourth stage, let's say, to haul the iron ore, but also trucks would be used as a consumer good.
So, different goods of the same physical quality, I mean, similar goods that are exactly the same physically, would be different stage goods, depending on how they were used.
This is all, as I said, is all very abstract. Let me, for a moment, throw you back to the Crusoe economy and let you see, and I want you to just neglect that last column.
We don't need that. Actually, we don't need, we only need the first three.
And let me show you how capital accumulation, the building of capital, and also what we would call saving, occur.
Robin de Cruz is on an island. He has only his own energy. There's nothing there. It's just the natural resources on the island.
He has no capital goods and his own energy. Let's look at what his inputs and outputs are.
In the first period, and we call it T sub zero here, what happens? Crusoe spends 12 hours, and I sort of use a similar example, fishing, and can catch four fish with his hands.
Very low productivity. He has to stand in the stream and literally grab at the fish. So he catches one every three hours.
Leisure is also a consumer good. It's a directly produced consumer good. It's one of my favorites, actually.
Just laying around watching television, watching my high-definition television that Peter helped me set up.
Anyway, so he's got a very low standard of living, just keeping himself alive.
Now, he knows that if he produces a net, he can increase his output.
So what he does then is he cannot just produce the net and have the same standard of living.
of Living, he has to reduce his leisure and or his output of consumer goods like fish
in order to have time or to save hours to invest in the net. And notice what he does.
So now he doesn't just have consumer goods industries, you see 11 hours for leisure,
9 hours for fish, his standard of living falls for a while, and it takes him 500 hours, 400
In the last four hours of the day, he spends on building the net, and after 500 hours, over time, that net is built.
So now he has a capital good, now there's a capital structure in the economy.
He uses the net then to increase his productivity.
With the net, he can catch one fish per hour. His productivity in fishing has tripled.
So if you look under T2, what he does is he increases his leisure and he increases his consumption of fish.
consumption of fish, consumption of fish more than doubles, his leisure increases by two hours, he has to spend one hour replacing the net, repairing it every day, cleaning it and so on, otherwise it will fall apart, okay?
If he stopped doing that, and used that other hour to work and catch another fish for leisure, that net would wear out, and he would be thrown back to a very low standard of living, okay?
So what we're trying to say here is that people have to overcome their time preference for present goods,
that is, they have to reduce their amount of leisure and fish for a period of time in order to accumulate capital.
It's a sacrifice to accumulate capital. That's what the capitalist does.
Okay, now, does he want to grow more? Because this is really economic growth.
Does he want to grow more? Well, let's assume he does. But again, it's going to take another sacrifice.
in leisure from 14 to 13 hours, cuts back in fish from 9 to 7, and he saves three hours a day.
Okay? So what happens to standard living? It goes down again from what it was.
Still higher than before he built the net. So he spends three hours a day in 200 days,
because it's 600 hours total investment in building the ladder. He builds the ladder.
And then what happens? We see that the fruits of that sacrifice come only in the future, okay?
Now, under T4, he has 13 hours of leisure, no less than he had before, or one less than he had before, but he has eight fish, okay, instead of seven, and he has six coconuts, okay?
And he has to spend a half hour fixing the ladder every day and repairing it, keeping it in good repair, and one hour placing it in the net.
But now he has a greater variety of goods as the standard living has risen.
So we'll just take it one more step.
He might want to build a house.
And there, to build a house, he's going to have to cut back on the amount of fish, the amount of coconuts,
and he'll spend an hour and a half a day building the house, and eventually the house will come into existence.
Now, this is how the United States, just to take an example, grew economically.
Think about the first pilgrims that landed and how to carve a living pretty much with their hands,
out of the forest and so on, and build some rough sort of shelter to find wild game and so on.
But they built up a capital structure. They made axes. They built buildings.
They built wagons and carts and so on. They domesticated horses, or horses were brought with them.
But they bred the horses so they would have more horses and so on.
And very slowly America, the U.S. became, developed a mighty capital structure so that by World War I we had the greatest industrial power in the world.
Now, my question to you is, what if everybody suddenly had a high time preference during the 19th century, okay?
Let's say people suddenly said, you know what, or even today, it doesn't matter, let's say all of us stopped saving today, okay?
We all went out and splurged and bought luxury cars, ate out every night, everyone sold their stocks and bonds, emptied their bank accounts, okay?
What would happen to the mighty capital structure built up over hundreds of years in the United States?
Factories wouldn't be repaired. For a while we would get a lot of consumer goods. In fact we'd get more consumer goods for a while.
Because there's a lot coming down through the pipeline.
But payments could not be made to workers in the mining industry and so on.
So eventually the mines were closed. No one would be working the oil wells.
We wouldn't be getting any natural resources to turn into raw materials.
The factories would then over time begin falling apart and we would be thrust back to the 1600s.
And probably most of the population would die.
The key thing is, capital does not reproduce itself automatically.
It takes sacrifice on the part of capitalists.
Now, capitalists are not a separate class. It's another point we have to make.
All of us are capitalists to the extent that we save and invest.
Even putting money in a mutual fund, you don't have to directly invest in a company through a stock or a bond.
You can put money in a mutual fund, in a bank, in an insurance, in your pension.
All that money is invested throughout the structure of production that we talked about before.
I'll put it back up again.
Actually, I'll put up a new diagram that shows it being increased.
Before the structural production had four stages, now it has six stages in this example.
The reason being that I assumed that people now change their saving, consumption-saving ratio.
Remember before consumers were spending $110?
Consumers now cut down to spending only $90 and saving an extra $20.
If you want to save the extra $20, you have to add extra stages.
And the extra stages means that we have more and more capital goods being built.
So now the value of the capital goods is much higher than it was before.
It's $20 higher than it was before. We don't have to go into too much detail here.
But now, instead of spending $110 on consumption, that was before, and only $180 on capital goods,
we're now spending only $90 on consumption, but $200 on capital goods.
Key point here though, we have less spending on consumption, why would capitalists invest
if they expect fewer dollars at the end of the process?
This is what Keynes called the paradox of thrift.
Before Keynes wrote, in 1936 however, Hayek had already solved the problem.
In 1929 he wrote a paper called the paradox of saving, in which he showed exactly why
it happened.
Now what happens is this, as laborers are shifted up to the higher stages and more capital goods are produced, it lowers costs.
Each laborer becomes more productive, so labor costs are lowered, overall costs are lowered.
And as a result, as the goods come out on the market and think about now the high tech industry, as we got more and more PCs,
as there was more saving and investment in that industry, what happens to the prices of PCs?
They tumble. So you could get a computer for $3 million in 1978, and it would take up a whole room in your house,
and it wouldn't even have the computing power and the speed that just a normal run-of-the-mill PC would have today.
Prices have come down to $2,000 for a desktop of $500 now.
But yet, the computer industry didn't shrink, the first year PCs were shipped there was something like 500,000 shipped, by 2000 there was something like 10 million shipped, but prices were falling, why would these capitalists continue to invest and expand the computer industry?
Because their costs were falling by more, which is exactly what happens here.
Now, if the Fed didn't inflate, we would actually see prices falling.
Because now there's $90, consumers spending $90 on more goods.
So there are more goods being sold, all supplies are shifting out, and less money being spent.
So all prices would fall.
Now, that's how the increase in your standard of living will be reflected.
That's how it used to be reflected in the 19th century.
Every year, except for wars, like the Civil War and the Britain, the war against Napoleon,
every year there would be a fall in prices.
As the capital structure increased, increased labor productivity,
caused more goods to come onto the market,
and with a given amount of gold, or a very slowly increasing amount of gold,
as we were on the gold standard then, prices would fall.
So that's the paradox of saving.
and it was solved eight years before Keynes came up with his brilliant idea of the paradox of thrift.
That is that if we all try to save more, well then we'll be spending less on consumption goods
and capitalists will want to produce less and it will plunge the economy into a depression.
But this shows a complete lack of understanding of the capital structure and how the capital structure is developed.
And that is, what capitalists are interested in isn't the final payment.
It's the difference between the amount they invest and the amount they receive.
And you can see, even at more stages, they're investing less than they're receiving.
It's the rate of price spreads that determines capital investment.
Now, so you have two parts of what we call the time market.
or the inter-temporal market, where people are trading present goods for future goods.
You have the loan market, the biggest part of which is actually loaning money to producers,
but also consumer loan market on the one hand, and then you have the structure of production.
Everybody who invests, or either lends or invests money, is a capitalist.
So we actually perform as individuals more than one role.
We're capitalists, but we also may be workers. Most of us are also workers. We're laborers.
And if we own land or rent out land and so on, then we're also landowners.
Notice one thing here, and I'll get back to it. The rate of return when we had less saving was 10% before.
Remember I mentioned that to you? Now, in each stage, the rate of return is about...
somewhere interest it's about fourth it's about that's wrong the rate of
interest well it's basically um if the final stage see we have sixty it's
whatever four over over six sixty dollars is okay I thought I had the
interest rate here let's see oh that's a rate of interest it's about seven
percent okay so the interest rate will fall as is more saving as the interest
If the interest rate falls, what happens is that that's an incentive to capitalists to borrow more money and to begin to invest more in new stages and to develop a greater capital structure.
So keeping in mind that there's two parts of this inter-temporal market, I can show you then the simple supply and demand diagram.
The Interest Rate is determined by the supply of savings, which is the supply of present goods and the demand for future goods, that is, it's determined both by those who are lending money to borrowers, as well as those capitalists who are investing in the structure of production.
Those are the people who supply present goods or savings, okay?
Those people who demand savings are the consumers that are borrowing, okay?
As well as wage earners that are getting wages.
The intersection will give you the interest rate, okay?
Now, as people's time preferences fall, the supply of savings shifts out.
So the interest rate will drop. In this case, it drops from...
Let's say we have an interest rate initially of 10% at the top here and suddenly people want to save more.
Their time preferences begin to fall.
As we said, there could be a variety of reasons for time preferences falling for people re-evaluating future versus present goods.
One of the most important reasons is as we get richer, as the capital structure evolves and makes all workers more productive,
Given a higher income, you will tend to save a higher proportion of that income.
So it's self-reinforcing, not automatically self-reinforcing,
but the more money we have now, the more we begin to allocate money to the future.
So if you think of a very, very poor person that really has just enough income to keep alive,
they save very, very little.
But as your income increases, you begin to take more thought for the future.
Now, you can't compare between people. There might still be, we know there are rich playboys like Mike Tyson, for example, that earned $400 million in his boxing career, and he's bankrupt. It's all gone.
We call that super high time preference.
Other sports stars have gone on and been very frugal with their money and have started companies afterwards and so on.
So again, it's a question of your values. But anyway, so suddenly you have more savings than can be absorbed at 10%.
And so the interest rate has to fall. As the interest rate falls, and let's assume that there are financial intermediaries like mutual funds and banks and so on,
and so on. Capitalists will borrow more and invest those into the structure of
production. One other point I want to make, consumption loans. If consumption
loans increase, the demand for consumption loans increased, and you didn't have any
increase in investment in the structure of production, you could reduce your
structure of production, right? Because consumption loans are dis-saving, okay?
People who have high time preferences are getting those loans and they're using them to spend on consumer goods.
So another point I want to make is the supply of savings isn't just what you put into a bank.
There's a wide variety of financial instruments that you purchase that will funnel your savings into the production structure.
So we're including money not just put in banks in that supply of savings,
Money spent on new or old stocks, bonds, mutual funds, put in pensions, many, many different ways of saving.
I just want to say a few more words about something that Peter touched on, but I want to just go over it real quickly.
Actually, before I do that, let me just give you a little series of symbols here that really represents the reputation of Keynes's paradox of thrift.
See, where most macroeconomists just look on the economy as producing one lump that they call GDP,
the Austrians, Hayek and Mises, tend to divide the economy up into two different kinds of sets of industries,
actually more than two, but for simplicity I'm only using two.
On the top, you have all these Cs as subscripts, and what they do represent is the consumption goods industry.
On the bottom, you have Ks, and that represents capital goods industries.
As we know, actually, we have a whole structure of capital goods.
Let's say people's time preferences fall.
Suddenly they want to, they begin spending less on consumption and saving more.
Let's say it's a baby boomer generation ages, and they're worried about paying for their
college.
Well, that's all gone now.
We're already paying for, we've already spent hundreds of thousands on our kids' college
education.
and money aside for retirement and so on.
So there's a big change in social time preferences.
So this ratio goes down meaning the numerator falls, consumption spending, and saving increases.
Well, here's what Keynes looked at. He looked at the top line here.
Obviously if consumption spending falls, the demand for consumer goods goes down.
That's why I have the downward arrow.
The price of consumer goods then falls. And so does profits. Pi represents profits.
And the amount of labor and wages fall in consumer goods industries, and therefore labor decreases. They leave.
They shift to higher paying, as we'll see in a moment, capital goods industries.
And finally, the amount of consumption itself, or the amount of consumer goods decreases.
Well, Keynes said, if all that happens, that's going to cause unemployment.
Firms are going to cut back on the amount of consumer goods they produce, which is all true.
Well, Keynes missed, of course, either out of ignorance or deliberately,
because he was writing a tract for the times.
That is, he wanted to write a tract justifying government deficit spending and increases in the money supply,
Because he believed this would get us out of the Great Britain out of the Depression.
Whatever the reason, he didn't take into account the fact that when the denominator increases, you have a fall in interest rates.
And once you have a fall in interest rates, there's an increase in the demand for capital on the part of the capitalists.
And they will then demand more capital goods, which means that the price of capital goods will go up.
and therefore profits in the capital goods industry will go up, which will stimulate them to expand.
And so therefore they'll try to get more workers, they'll raise wages for workers
and they'll get more workers. So the workers that are being set free
in the consumer goods industry, being laid off, will
find their way into the capital goods industry, or in fact will be drawn into the capital goods industry
by the higher wages.
Eventually we'll have more capital goods produced
and then finally in the future
You'll get more consumer goods, so I have CF there.
The point is, when people reduce their spending on consumer goods now,
does it mean that they want less consumer goods for all time?
Of course not.
They don't want to sacrifice consumer goods for no reason.
They do that because they believe they can have more consumer goods in the future.
Now, if you think back to the Robinson Crusoe example I gave you,
when Robinson Crusoe consumed less fish when he was building the net,
does that mean he wanted less fish for all time?
Did he say to himself, you know what, my economy is in depression now, I'm only working for three fish, I have to go home for the last four hours.
No, he used the four hours to do what? To build the net.
So laying off workers in the consumer's goods industry is a sine qua non, sine qua non, the French word, without which not.
It's a prerequisite of increasing capital goods, okay?
And that's what the Austrians understood and that's what Keynes ignored, okay?
Let me just say two more words, or two more, make two more points.
One point is that, as Peter pointed out,
Far right. Got it. Okay. Thank you.
Once you have a change in the interest rate, or rather, once we introduce the interest rate,
if you have the demand for labor as being determined by the marginal revenue product of labor as Peter talked about,
you have to take into account that that labor is being paid in advance, paid for in advance by capitalists.
So, to refute Marx, the laborers are getting less than their full marginal revenue product,
less than they're adding to production, but that's because the product is not coming forth onto the market until some future period of time, okay?
So the demand for labor shifts down to the DMRP, okay?
So at each point, laborers get paid less than the full marginal revenue product.
Why? Because the discount is what goes to the capitalist.
That amount of money, the discount on the marginal revenue product,
is what the capitalist earns for time preference.
Last but not least, something else that I believe Peter went over.
The interest rate is necessary to determine the capital value of durable factors of production,
Capital Goods and Land and so on.
So if you have a machine with a life of three years
and you expect that machine to add $1,000
to the revenue of your firm each year
and the interest rate is 10%,
there's a very simple present value formula
that you use to find out
what the total capital value of the machine is.
You can either rent it for $1,000 a year each year
or you can purchase it in advance
for an amount of $2,487.
Now, if you purchase it in advance, then the return on the machine is basically 10% per year.
That's what the interest rate would be.
Last but not least, the basic land, which we know is permanent.
We're not talking about agricultural land, but basically a standing room.
Land where you have to stand to work on, or you put buildings on or farms on.
The basic ground land. If that is going to yield you $50,000 per year in terms of the addition to the total revenue of the firm or the production process, then what's going to happen is that you're going to get, the factor price is going to be equal to the marginal revenue product divided by the interest rate.
So, if land is assumed to give $50,000 a year in additional revenue, then you would divide that by the 10%, .10, and so that land would be worth $500,000.
If you had no time preference and interest rate was zero, then the land would have what kind of value?
An infinite value. Because you wouldn't discount that $50,000 a year at all. So it would be an infinite price.
So that's another argument, or illustration rather, that time preference exists and must be positive, the fact that land has a finite price.
I will stop here and entertain any questions you may have. Yes.
Why do I keep hearing the fear of declining prices? What's the basis of this fear of declining prices?
The point is that there is deflation phobia that has arisen as a result of the experience with the Great Depression,
not the experience itself, but the misinterpretation of what caused the Great Depression.
And much of this misinterpretation has to be laid on the shoulders of Milton Friedman and his very influential interpretation of the Great Depression.
The Great Depression, actually himself and his co-author Anna Schwartz.
Their point was that the Fed caused the Great Depression,
or they caused a garden variety recession to turn into a Great Depression
because they allowed the money supply to shrink.
Now, first of all, that's deflation in a different sense than just falling prices, number one.
But secondly, yes, the money supply did shrink, and it shrunk substantially by about one-third, I believe, from 1930 to 1933,
but it shrunk in an economic environment in which prices were not allowed to fall,
in which Hoover brought in, at the beginning of the Depression, the big businessmen in the U.S.
and exhorted them not to lower wages because if they lowered wages,
that means that workers would have less to spend on consumer goods
And we'd have more unemployment because fewer consumer goods would be produced and it would be a downward spiral.
And then later on, when Roosevelt came in, we had the National Recovery Act, which basically cartelized different industries and made prices rigid.
If prices were permitted to fall, as the money supply fell, things would have been much different.
We wouldn't have had the problem of falling prices or really a rising purchasing power of money confronting fixed rigid wages.
Also, one thing which was interesting, I believe it was Joseph Stiglitz or, I think it was Stiglitz, it may have been Krugman.
They wrote an article this past year in which they pointed out, it was a memorial to Milton Friedman,
Friedman, but in the article they pointed out some of the mistakes he made and what they said was that in fact, they were saying from a Keynesian point of view, in fact it was not the case that the Fed caused the money supply to contract, the Fed did everything it could after 1930 to inflate the money supply by issuing new money, but it was Krugman who said that, Paul Krugman said that, by issuing new money, one of the few true and important things Krugman has ever said.
issuing more bank reserves, but the banks were fearful of lending these out so that, you know, they were holding excess reserves,
and also people were taking money out of the banks, reducing their reserves at the same time.
So the Fed had no experience with this before.
I mean, the Fed was trying to the best of its ability and knowledge to increase the money supply for a number of years,
But society was massively moving away from the banking system.
It was really the chickens of the 1920 monetary inflation coming home to roost.
The banks had overextended themselves, and in a market economy,
there's nothing wrong with even financial institutions failing if they've made mistakes in the past.
And that was what was happening. It was the liquidation process of past errors.
What do you think of the current savings rate in this country? Is it in fact low? And if so, how would you explain it?
Well, there's a couple of things here. One is the fact that people have saved less because of the housing boom.
They see the equity in their houses going up, and they feel that, well, you know what?
That's fungible with the money in the bank, so I'll take some money out of my bank, or I'll even take cash into my equity, and I'll consume more.
They are saving. They're saving in that the value is locked up in their house.
Yes, that's true. But really, if it's a bubble, it's a false value.
It's a value that's going to be reversed, as we see now with the housing bubble collapsing.
Also, I think the saving rate 401k contributions are not counted as savings.
I wasn't aware of that. If that's true, that's seriously undercounting.
The money coming out is ignored.
Okay. I didn't realize that. Yes, Pavel? Okay. Anyone else? Any other questions? Okay, thank you.