Just as there is a prevalent idea among the economically illiterate that all interest should be zero—should be abolished—so among the economically literate there is a prevalent idea that the rate of interest could under no imaginable conditions ever be zero or below.#
Spending and investing differ only in degree, depending on the length of time elapsing between the expenditure and the enjoyment.#
Strictly speaking, in making up our income statistics, we should always calculate the value of services, and never the value of the objects rendering those services.#
Time preference is not a sui generis component of the rational choice model. In fact, the preference for present goods over future goods masks two quite different phenomena. This being the case, you don’t need behaviorism to see why we’re more willing to bring goods into the present than to . . .