The nature of capital and income

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 102659555X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-82920

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fisher, Irving http://d-nb.info/gnd/118533541

Title:: The nature of capital and income

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: The Macmillan Company

Year of publication:: 1923

Scope:: XXI, 427 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2019

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part I. Capital

Collection:: Economics Books

CHAPTER V CAPITAL ACCOUNTS §1 WE have defined capital as a quantity of wealth existing at an instant of time. A full view of capital would be afforded by an instantaneous photograph of wealth. This would reveal, in addition to the durable wealth, a large amount of goods of rapid consumption. It would disclose, not the annual procession of such goods, but the members of that procession that had not yet been transmuted in form or passed off the stage of existence, however swiftly they might be moving across it. It would show train- loads of meat, eggs, and milk in transit, cargoes of fish, spices, and sugar, as well as the contents of private pantries, ice chests, and wine cellars. Even the supplies on the table of a man bolting his dinner would find a place. So the clothes in one’s wardrobe or on one’s back, the tobacco in a smoker’s pouch or pipe, the oil in the can or lamp, would all be elements in this flash-light picture of capital. Such a collection of wealth is, however, heterogeneous; it cannot be expressed in a single sum. We can inventory the separate items, but we cannot add them together. They may, however, be reduced to a homogeneous mass by considering, not their kinds and quantities, but their values. And this value of any stock of wealth is also called “capital.” To distinguish these two senses of capital, we call a stock, store, or accumulation of existing instruments of wealth, each instrument being measured in its own unit, capital-instruments, or capital-wealth, and we call the value of this stock, when all articles are measured in a com- 66

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