"To illustrate this important concept, we will use the
example given by Böhm-Bawerk to explain the process of saving
and investment in capital goods carried out by an individual
actor in an isolated situation, such as Robinson Crusoe
on his island.*
Let us suppose that Robinson Crusoe has just arrived on
his island and spends his time picking berries by hand, his
only means of subsistence. Each day he devotes all of his
efforts to gathering berries, and he picks enough to survive
and can even eat a few extra daily. After several weeks on this
diet, Robinson Crusoe makes the entrepreneurial discovery
that with a wooden stick several meters long, he could reach
higher and further, strike the bushes with force and gather the
necessary berries much quicker. The only problem is that he
estimates it could take him five whole days to find a suitable
tree from which to take the stick and then to prepare it by
pulling off its branches, leaves, and imperfections. During this
time he will be compelled to interrupt his berry picking. If he
wants to produce the stick, he will have to reduce his consumption
of berries for a time and store the remainder in a
basket until he has enough to survive for five days, the predicted
duration of the production process of the wooden
stick. After planning his action, Robinson Crusoe decides to
undertake it, and therefore he must first save a portion of the
berries he picks by hand each day, reducing his consumption
by that amount. This clearly means he must make an
inevitable sacrifice, which he nevertheless deems well worth
his effort in relation to the goal he longs to achieve. So he
decides to reduce his consumption (in other words, to save)
for several weeks while storing his leftover berries in a basket
until he has accumulated an amount he believes will be sufficient
to sustain him while he produces the stick.
This example shows that each process of investment in
capital goods requires prior saving; that is, a decrease in consumption,
which must fall below its potential level.** Once
Robinson Crusoe has saved enough berries, he spends five
days searching for a branch from which to make his wooden
stick, separating it from the tree and perfecting it. What does
he eat during the five days it takes him to prepare the stick, a
production process which forces him to interrupt his daily
harvest of berries? He simply consumes the berries he accumulated
in the basket over the preceding several-week period
during which he saved the necessary portion from his handpicked
berries and experienced some hunger. In this way, if
Robinson Crusoe’s calculations were correct, at the end of five
days he will have the stick (a capital good), which represents
an intermediate stage removed in time (by five days of saving)
from the immediate processes of the berry production (by
hand) which up to that point had occupied him. With the finished
stick Robinson Crusoe can reach places inaccessible to
him by hand and strike the bushes with force, multiplying his
production of berries by ten. As a result, from that point on his
stick enables him to gather in one-tenth of a day the berries he
needs to survive, and he can spend the rest of his time resting
or pursuing subsequent goals that are much more important
to him (like building a hut or hunting animals to vary his diet
and make clothes).
Robinson Crusoe’s production process, like any other,
clearly arises from an act of entrepreneurial creativity, the
actor’s realization that he stands to benefit, i.e., he can accomplish
ends more valuable to him, by employing action
processes which require a longer period of time (because they
include more stages). Thus action or production processes
yield capital goods, which are simply intermediate economic
goods in an action process whose aim has not yet been
reached. The actor is only willing to sacrifice his immediate
consumption (i.e., to save) if he thinks that by doing so he will
achieve goals he values more (in this case, the production of
ten times more berries than he could gather by hand). Furthermore
Robinson Crusoe must attempt to coordinate as well as
possible his present behavior with his foreseeable future behavior.
More specifically, he must avoid initiating action processes
that are excessively long in relation to his savings: it would be
tragic for him to run out of berries (that is, to consume all he
has saved) halfway through the process of producing a capital
good and without reaching his goal. He must also refrain
from saving too much with respect to his future investment
needs, since by doing so he would only unnecessarily sacrifice
his immediate consumption. Robinson Crusoe’s subjective
assessment of his time preference is precisely what
enables him to adequately coordinate or adjust his present
behavior in relation to his future needs and behavior. On the
one hand, the fact that his time preference is not absolute
makes it possible for him to forfeit some of his present consumption
over a period of several weeks with the hope of
thus being able to produce the stick. On the other hand, the
fact that he does have a time preference explains why he only
devotes his efforts to creating a capital good he can produce
in a limited period of time and which requires sacrificing and
saving for a limited number of days. If Robinson Crusoe had
no time preference, nothing would stop him from dedicating
all of his efforts to building a hut right away (which, forexample, might take him a month minimum), a plan he
would not be able to carry out without first having saved a
large quantity of berries. Therefore he would either starve to
death or the project, out of all proportion to his potential saving,
would soon be interrupted and abandoned. At any rate, it
is important to understand that the real saved resources (the
berries in the basket) are precisely the ones which enable
Robinson Crusoe to survive during the time period he spends
producing the capital good and during which he ceases to
gather berries directly. Even though Robinson Crusoe is
undoubtedly much more productive harvesting berries with
his wooden stick than he is with his bare hands, there is also
no doubt that the process of berry production using the stick
is a more lengthy one in terms of time (it includes more stages)
than the production process of berry picking by hand. Production
processes tend to increase in length and duration (i.e.,
to become more complex and include more stages) as a result
of the saving and entrepreneurial activity of humans; and the
longer and more time-consuming these processes become, the
more productive they tend to be."
*This is the classic example given by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Kapital
und Kapitalzins: Positive Theorie des Kapitales (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen
Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1889), pp. 107–35. This work has
been translated into English by Hans F. Sennholz, Capital and Interest,
vol. 2: Positive Theory of Capital (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press,
1959), pp. 102–18.
**Saving always results in capital goods, even when initially these
merely consist of the consumer goods (in our example the “berries”)
which remain unsold (or are not consumed). Then gradually some capital
goods (the berries) are replaced by others (the wooden stick), as the
workers (Robinson Crusoe) combine their labor with natural resources
through a process which takes time and which humans are able to go
through due to their reliance on the unsold consumer goods (the saved
berries). Hence saving produces capital goods first (the unsold consumer
goods that remain in stock) which are gradually used up and
replaced by another capital good (the wooden stick). On this important
point, see Richard von Strigl, Capital and Production, edited with an
introduction by Jörg Guido Hülsmann (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute,
2000), pp. 27 and 62."
[footnotes do livro, mas é claro; página 325 e seguintes]
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