30

Frank A. Fetter [March

“the essence of interest,” though my doubts are for a different
reason.‘° It is interesting to notice that Fisher himself did not
seem to hold this view when he wrote The Rate of Interest, in 1907.
He saı1d +41

It shows also that the preference for present over future goods of
like kind and number is not, as some writers seem to assume, a necessary
 attribute of human nature, but that it depends always on the
relative provisioning of the present and future.
In an article in 1911,* he for the first time used the term impatience
 in this connection, which he confesses is but a “catchword”
 in place of time-preference. With this change of name has
gone a change in the conception of the thing designated.

In my own book, T’he Rate of Interest, for instance, this term was
unused because unthought of, and the clumsier and less explanatory
;erm ‘“time-preference” was employed instead. The proposal to employ
 the term “impatience”” is here made for the first time. , . . Impa--ience
 is a fundamental attribute of human nature.

In 1912,* he restates the same view: “It [impatience] is a
fundamental attribute of human nature. . . . Interest is, as it
were, human impatience ecrystallized into a market rate.”
My objection to this change of terms is that if the new word is
more “catchy” it is less fitting than the word it displaces. Impatience
 is freighted with suggestions of “eagerness for change,
restlessness, chafing of spirit, fretfulness, passion” (Webster).
Time-valuation or time-preference better expresses the complex of
motives which at one time impels men to get goods earlier, and
again lcads them to postpone use by storing goods and by working
 for the future in many ways. A prevailing rate of interest
is the resultant of all kinds and degrees of time-preference in a
community, preference for goods in the future in some cases as well
as preference for goods in the present, and it seems a great straining
 of words to attribute the resulting rate of interest to impatience
alone. Patience, self-denial, the quality expressed in the old term
abstinence, have a no less important part in the explanation.
Let us pass with brief mention the question which takes up a
zoodly space in Seager’s eriticism and in Fisher’s reply—whether
individuals are able to, and actually do, bring their “rate of im-“

 Seager, AMERICAN Ecowomic Revızw, Dec., 1912, p. 835,
“The Rate of Interest, p. 184.
2 «The Impatience Theory of Interest,” Scientia, vol. IX, p. 387.
@ Elementary Princinles, pvp. 371.