capital and interestin economics, a stock of resources that may be employed in the production of goods and services and the price paid for the use of credit or money, respectively.

Capital in economics is a word of many meanings. They all imply that capital is a “stock” by contrast with income, which is a “flow.” In its broadest possible sense, capital includes the human population; nonmaterial elements such as skills, abilities, and education; land, buildings, machines, equipment of all kinds; and all stocks of goods—finished or unfinished—in the hands of both firms and households.

In the business world the word capital usually refers to an item in the balance sheet representing that part of the net worth of an enterprise that has not been produced through the operations of the enterprise. In economics the word capital is generally confined to “real” as opposed to merely “financial” assets. Different as the two concepts may seem, they are not unrelated. If all balance sheets were consolidated in a closed economic system, all debts would be cancelled out because every debt is an asset in one balance sheet and a liability in another. What is left in the consolidated balance sheet, therefore, is a value of all the real assets of a society on one side and its total net worth on the other. This is the economist’s concept of capital.

A distinction may be made between goods in the hands of firms and goods in the hands of households, and attempts have been made to confine the term capital structure to the former. There is also a distinction between goods that have been produced and goods that are gifts of nature; attempts have been made to confine the term capital to the former, though the distinction is hard to maintain in practice. Another important distinction is between the stock of human beings (and their abilities) and the stock of nonhuman elements. In a slave society human beings are counted as capital in the same way as livestock or machines. In a free society each man is his own slave—the value of his body and mind is not, therefore, an article of commerce and does not get into the accounting system. In strict logic persons should continue to be regarded as part of the capital of a society; but in practice the distinction between the part of the total stock that enters into the accounting system, and the part that does not, is so important that it is not surprising that many writers have excluded persons from the capital stock.

Another distinction that has some historical importance is that between circulating and fixed capital. Fixed capital is usually defined as that which does not change its form in the course of the process of production, such as land, buildings, and machines. Circulating capital consists of goods in process, raw materials, and stocks of finished goods waiting to be sold; these goods must either be transformed, as when wheat is ground into flour, or they must change ownership, as when a stock of goods is sold. This distinction, like many others, is not always easy to maintain. Nevertheless, it represents a rough approach to an important problem of the relative structure of capital; that is, of the proportions in which goods of various kinds are found. The stock of real capital exhibits strong complementarities. A machine is of no use without a skilled operator and without raw materials for it to work on.

The classical theory of capital

Although ancient and medieval writers were interested in the ethics of interest and usury, the concept of capital as such did not rise to prominence in economic thought before the classical economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Nassau Senior, and John Stuart Mill).

Adam Smith laid great stress on the role played by the accumulation of a stock of capital in facilitating the division of labour economics and in increasing the productivity of labour in general. He recognized clearly that accumulation proceeds from an excess of production over consumption. He distinguished between productive labour, which creates objects of capital, and unproductive labour (services), the fruits of which are enjoyed immediately. His thought was strongly coloured by observation of the annual agricultural cycle. The end of the harvest saw society with a given stock of grain. This stock was in the possession of the capitalists. A certain portion of it they reserved for their own consumption and for the consumption of their menial servants, the rest was used to feed “productive labourers” during the ensuing year. As a result, by the end of the next harvest the barns were full again and the stock had replaced itself, perhaps with something left over. The stock that the capitalists did not reserve for their own use was the “wages fund”—the more grain there was in the barn in October the sharper the competition of capitalists for workers, and the higher real wages would be in the year to come. The picture is a crude one, of course, and does not indicate the complexity of the relationship between stocks and flows in an industrial society. The last of the classical economists, John Stuart Mill, was forced to abandon the wages-fund theory. Nevertheless, the wages fund is a crude representation of some real but complex relationships, and the theory reappears in a more sophisticated form in later writers.

The classical economists distinguished three categories of income—wages, profit, and rent—and identified these with three factors of production—labour, capital, and land. David Ricardo especially made a sharp distinction between capital as “produced means of production,” and land as the “original and indestructible powers of the soil.” In modern economics this distinction has become blurred.

The Austrian school

About 1870 a new school developed, sometimes called the Austrian school from the fact that many of its principal members taught in Vienna, but perhaps better called the Marginalist school. The movement itself was thoroughly international, and included such figures as William Stanley Jevons in England and Léon Walras in France. The so-called Austrian theory of capital is mainly based on the work of Eugen Böhm-Bawerk. His Positive Theory of Capital (1889) set off a controversy that has not yet subsided. In the Austrian view the economic process consisted of the embodiment of “original factors of production” in capital goods of greater or lesser length of life that then yielded value or utility as they were consumed. Between the original embodiment of the factor and the final fruition in consumption lay an interval of time known as the period of production. In an equilibrium population it can easily be shown that the total population (capital stock) equals the annual number of births or deaths (income) multiplied by the average length of life (period of production). The longer the period of production, therefore, the more capital goods there will be per unit of income. If the period of production is constant, income depends directly on the amount of capital previously accumulated. Here is the wages fund in a new form. Unfortunately, the usefulness of Böhm-Bawerk’s theory is much impaired by the fact that it is confined to equilibrium states. The great problems of capital theory are dynamic in character, and comparative statics throws only a dim light on them.

Marginalist and Keynesian theories

The Marginalist school culminated in the work of three men—P.H. Wickstead in England, Knut Wicksell in Sweden, and Irving Fisher in the United States. The last two especially gave the Austrian theory clear mathematical expression. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Austrian theory was its recognition of the importance of the valuation problem in the relation of capital to interest. From the mere fact that physical capital produces an income stream, there is no explanation of the phenomenon of interest, for the question is why the value of a piece of physical capital should be less than the total of future values that are expected to accrue from it. The theory also makes a contribution to the problem of rational choice in situations involving waiting or maturing. The best example is that of slowly maturing goods such as wines or timber. There is a problem here of the best time to draw wine or to cut down a tree. According to the marginal theory this is at the time when the rate of net value growth of the item is just equal to the rate of interest, or the rate of return in alternative investments. Thus, if a tree or a wine is increasing in value at the rate of 7 percent per annum when the rate of interest is 6 percent it still pays to be patient and let it grow or mature. The longer it grows, however, the less the rate of value growth, and when the rate of value growth has fallen to the rate of interest, then is the time to reap the fruits of patience.

The contributions of John Maynard (Lord) Keynes to capital theory are incidental rather than fundamental. Nevertheless, the “Keynesian revolution” had an impact on this area of economic thought as on most others. It overthrew the traditional assumption of most economists that savings were automatically invested. The great contribution of Keynes, then, is the recognition that the attempt to save does not automatically result in the accumulation of capital. A decision to restrict consumption is only a decision to accumulate capital if the volume of production is constant. If abstention from consumption itself results in a diminution of production, then accumulation (production minus consumption) is correspondingly reduced.

Later thinking

The theory of capital was not a matter of primary concern to economists in the late 20th century, though some revival of interest occurred in the late 1950s. Nevertheless, certain problems remain of perennial interest. They may be grouped as follows.

Heterogeneous goods

First are the problems involved in measuring aggregates of goods. Real capital includes everything from screwdrivers to continuous strip-rolling mills. A single measure of total real capital can be achieved only if each item can be expressed in a common denominator such as a given monetary unit (e.g., dollars, sterling, francs, pesos, etc.). The problem becomes particularly complicated in periods of rapid technical change when there is change not only in the relative values of products but in the nature of the list itself. Only approximate solutions can be found to this problem, and no completely satisfactory measure is ever possible.

A related problem that has aroused considerable interest among accountants is how to value capital assets that have no fixed price. In the conventional balance sheet the value of some items is based on their cost at an earlier period than that of others. When the general level of prices is changing this means that different items are valued in monetary units of different purchasing power. The problem is particularly acute in the valuation of inventory. Under the more conventional “FIFO” (First In, First Out) system, inventory is valued at the cost (purchase price) of the latest purchases. This leads to an inflation of inventory values, and therefore of accounting profits, in time of rising prices (and a corresponding deflation under falling prices), which may be an exaggeration of the long-run position of the firm. This may be partially avoided by a competing system of valuation known as LIFO (Last In, First Out), in which inventory is valued at the purchase price of the earliest purchases. This avoids the fluctuations caused by short-run price-level changes, but it fails to record changes in real long-run values. There seems to be no completely satisfactory solution to this problem, and it is wise to recognize the fact that any single figure of capital value that purports to represent a complex, many-dimensional reality will need careful interpretation.

The accumulation process

A second problem concerns the factors that determine the rate of accumulation of capital; that is, the rate of investment. It has been seen that investment in real terms is the difference between production and consumption. The classical economist laid great stress on frugality as the principal source of capital accumulation. If production is constant it is true that the only way to increase accumulation is by the reduction of consumption. Keynes shifted the emphasis from the reduction of consumption to the increase of production, and regarded the decision to produce investment goods as the principal factor in determining the rate of growth of capital. In modern theories of economic development great stress is laid on the problem of the structure of production—the relative proportions of different kinds of activity. The advocates of “balanced growth” emphasize the need for a developing country to invest in a wide range of related and cooperative enterprises, public as well as private. There is no point in building factories and machines, they say, if the educational system does not provide a labour force capable of using them. There is also, however, a case to be made for “unbalanced growth,” in the sense that growth in one part of the economy frequently stimulates growth in other parts. A big investment in mining or in hydroelectric power, for example, creates strains on the whole society, which result in growth responses in the complementary sectors. The relation of inflation to economic growth and investment is an important though difficult problem. There seems to be little doubt that deflation, mainly because it shifts the distribution of income away from the profit maker toward the rentier and bondholder, has a deleterious effect on investment and the growth of capital. In 1932, for instance, real investment had practically ceased in the United States. It is less clear at what point inflation becomes harmful to investment. In countries where there has been long continuing inflation there seems to be some evidence that the structure of investment is distorted. Too much goes into apartment houses and factories and not enough into schools and communications.

Capital and time

A third problem that exists in capital theory is that of the period of production and the time structure of the economic process. This cannot be solved by the simple formulas of the Austrian school. Nevertheless, the problem is a real one and there is still a need for more useful theoretical formulations of it. Decisions taken today have results extending far into the future. Similarly, the data of today’s decisions are the result of decisions that were taken long in the past. The existing capital structure is the embodiment of past decisions and the raw material of present decisions. The incompatibility of decisions is frequently not discovered at the time they are made because of the lapse of time between the decision and its consequences. It is tempting to regard the cyclical structure of human history, whether the business cycle or the war cycle, as a process by which the consequences of bad decisions accumulate until some kind of crisis point is reached. The crisis (a war or a depression) redistributes power in the society and so leads to a new period of accumulating, but hidden, stress. In this process, distortion in the capital structure is of great importance.

Capital and income

A fourth problem to be considered is the relationship that exists between the stocks and the flows of a society, or in a narrower sense the relation between capital and income. Income, like capital, is a concept that is capable of many definitions; a useful approach to the concept of income is to regard it as the gross addition to capital in a given period. For any economic unit, whether a firm or an individual, income may be measured by that hypothetical amount of consumption that would leave capital intact. In real terms this is practically identical with the concept of production. The total flow of income is closely related to both the quantity and the structure of capital; the total real income of a society depends on the size and the skills of its population, and on the nature and the extent of the equipment with which they have to work. The most important single measure of economic well-being is real income per person; this is closely related to the productivity of labour, and this in turn is closely related to capital per person, especially if the results of investment in human resources, skills, and education are included in the capital stock.


Historically, the concept of capital has been so closely bound to the concept of interest that it seems wise to take these two topics together, even though in the modern view it is capital and income rather than capital and interest that are the related concepts.

Interest as a form of income may be defined as income that is received as a result of the possession of contractual obligations for payment on the part of another. Interest, in other words, is income that is received as a result of the ownership of a bond, a promissory note, or some other instrument that represents a promise on the part of some other party to pay sums in the future. The obligations may take many forms. In the case of the perpetuity, the undertaking is to pay a certain sum each year or other interval of time for the indefinite future. A bond with a date of maturity usually involves a promise to pay a certain sum each year for a given number of years, and then a larger sum on the terminal date. A promissory note frequently consists of a promise to pay a single sum at a date that is some time in the future.

If a1, a2,…an are the sums received by the bondholder in years 1, 2…n, and if P0 is the present value in year 0, or the sum for which the bond is purchased, the rate of interest r in the whole transaction is given by the equation

There is no general solution for this equation, though in practice it can be solved easily by successive approximation, and in special cases the equation reduces to much simpler forms. In the case of a promissory note, for instance, the equation reduces to the form

where an is the single promised payment. In the case of a perpetuity with an annual payment of a, the formula reduces to

Thus if one had to pay $200 to purchase a perpetual annuity of $5 per annum, the rate of interest would be 2 12 percent.

It should be observed that the dimensions of the rate of interest are those of a rate of growth. The rate of interest is not a price or ratio of exchange; it is not itself determined in the market. What is determined in the market is the price of contractual obligations or “bonds.” The higher the price of a given contractual obligation, the lower the rate of interest on it. Suppose, for instance, that one has a promissory note that is a promise to pay one $100 in one year’s time. If I buy this for $100 now, the rate of interest is zero; if I buy it for $95 now the rate of interest is a little over 5 percent; if I buy it for $90 now, the rate of interest is about 11 percent. The rate of interest may be defined as the gross rate of growth of capital in a contractual obligation.

A distinction is usually made between interest and profit as forms of income. In ordinary speech, profit usually refers to income derived from the ownership of aggregates or assets of all kinds organized in an enterprise. This aggregate is described by a balance sheet. In the course of the operations of the enterprise, the net worth grows, and profit is the gross growth of net worth. Stocks, as opposed to bonds, usually imply a claim on the profits of some enterprise.

The development of interest theory

In ancient and medieval times the main focus of inquiry into the theory of interest was ethical, and the principal question was the moral justification of interest. On the whole, the taking of interest was regarded unfavourably by both classical and medieval writers. Aristotle regarded money as “barren” and the medieval schoolmen were hostile to usury. Nevertheless, where interest fulfilled a useful social function elaborate rationalizations were developed for it. Among the classical economists, the focus of attention shifted away from ethical justification toward the problem of mechanical equilibrium. The question then became this: Is there any equilibrium rate of interest or rate of profit in the sense that where actual rates are above or below this, forces are brought into play, tending to change them toward the equilibrium? The classical economists did not provide any clear solution for this problem. They believed that the rate of interest simply followed the rate of profit, for people would not borrow or incur contractual obligations unless they could earn something more than the cost of the borrowing by investing the proceeds in enterprises or aggregates of real capital. They believed that the growth of capital itself would tend to reduce the rate of profit because of the competition of the capitalists. This doctrine is important in the Marxian dynamics in which the struggle of capital to avoid a falling rate of profit is seen as a critical factor leading, for instance, to unemployment, foreign investment, and imperialism.

In the framework of classical economics, the work of Nassau Senior deserves mention. He raised the question whether profit or interest were “paid for” anything; that is, whether there was any identifiable contribution to the general product of society that would not be forthcoming if this form of income were not paid. He identified such a function and called it abstinence. Karl Marx denied the existence of any such function and argued that the social product must be attributed entirely to acts of labour, capital being merely the embodied labour of the past. On this view, profit and interest are the result of pure exploitation in the sense that they consist of an income derived from the power position of the capitalist and not from the performance of any service. Non-Marxist economists have generally followed Senior in finding some function in society that corresponds to these forms of income.

The Marginalists generally held that profit and interest were related to the marginal productivity of the extension of the period of production. Böhm-Bawerk assumed that “roundabout” processes of production would generally be more productive than processes with shorter periods of production; he thought there was a productivity of “waiting” (to use the term of Alfred Marshall) and saw the rate of interest as an inducement to the capitalist to extend the period of production.

A low rate of interest leads to concentration on longer, more roundabout processes, and a high rate of interest on shorter, less roundabout processes. There is a limit, however, on the period of production imposed by the existing stock of accumulated capital. If one embarks on a long process with insufficient capital, he will find that he has exhausted his resources before the end of the process and before the fruits can be gathered. It is the business of the rate of interest to prevent this, and to adjust the roundaboutness of the processes used to the capital resources available. The Marginalists’ theory of interest reached its clearest expression in the work of Irving Fisher. He saw an equilibrium rate of interest as determined by the interaction of two sets of forces: the impatience of consumers on the one hand, and the returns from extending the period of production on the other.

John Maynard Keynes brought a new approach. His liquidity preference theory of interest is a short-run theory of the price of contractual obligations (“bonds”), and it is essentially an application of the general theory of market price. If people as a whole decide that they want to hold a larger proportion of their assets in the form of money, and if new money is not created to satisfy this desire, there will be a net desire to sell securities and the price of securities will fall. This is the same thing as a rise in the rate of interest. Conversely, if people want to get rid of money the price of securities will rise and the rate of interest will fall. This, then, is the theory of the “market” rate of interest, by contrast with the Marginalists’ theory, which concerns itself with whether or not there is a long-run equilibrium rate of interest. The controversy, therefore, between the liquidity preference theory—which regards interest as a “bribe” to prevent people holding money rather than bonds—and the time preference theory—which regards interest as a bribe to persuade people to postpone enjoyments to the future—can be resolved by placing the former in the short run and the latter in the long run.

Contemporary questions

The middle of the 20th century saw a considerable shift in the focus of concern relating to the theory of interest. Economists seemed to lose interest in the equilibrium theory, and their main concern was with the effect of rates of interest as a part of monetary policy in the control of inflation. It was recognized that the monetary authority could control the rate of interest in the short run. The controversy lay mainly between the advocates of “monetary policy” and the advocates of “fiscal policy.” If inflation is regarded as a symptom of a desire on the part of a society to consume and invest more in total than its resources permit, it is clear that the problem can be attacked either by diminishing investment or by diminishing consumption. On the whole, the attack of the advocates of monetary policy is on the side of diminishing investment, through raising rates of interest and making it harder to obtain loans, though the possibility that high rates of interest may restrict consumption is not overlooked. The alternative would seem to restrict consumption by raising taxes. This has the disadvantage of being politically unpopular. The mounting concern with economic growth, however, has raised considerable doubts about the use of high rates of interest as an instrument to control inflation. There is some doubt whether high interest rates in fact restrict investment; if they do not, they are ineffective, and if they do, they may be harmful to economic growth. This is a serious dilemma for the advocates of monetary policy. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the type of fiscal policy that might be most desirable theoretically has achieved very limited public support.

The ethics of interest

The problem of the ethics of interest is still unresolved after many centuries of discussion; as long as the institution of private property is accepted, the usefulness of borrowing and lending can hardly be denied. In the long historic process of inheritance, widowhood, gain and loss, by which the distribution of the ownership of capital is determined, there is no reason to suppose that the actual ownership of capital falls into the hands of those best able to administer it. Much of the capital of an advanced society, in fact, tends to be owned by elderly widows, simply because of the greater longevity of the female. Society, therefore, needs some machinery for separating the control of capital from its ownership. Financial instruments and financial markets are the principal agency for performing this function. If all securities took the form of stocks or equities, it might be argued that contractual obligations (bonds), and therefore interest as a form of income, would not be necessary. The case for bonds and interest, however, is the case for specialization. There is a demand for many different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and interest-bearing obligations tap a market that would be hard to reach with equity securities; they are also peculiarly well adapted to the obligations of governments. The principal justification for interest and interest-bearing securities is that they provide an easy and convenient way for skilled administrators to control capital that they do not own and for the owners of capital to relinquish its control. The price society pays for this arrangement is interest.

There remains the problem of the socially optimum rate of interest. It could be argued that there is no point in paying any higher price than one needs to and that the rate of interest should be as low as is consistent with the performance of the function of the financial markets. This position, of course, would place all the burden of control of economic fluctuations on the fiscal system, and it is questionable whether this would be acceptable politically.

The ancient problem of “usury,” in the form of the exploitation of the ignorant poor by moneylenders, is still important in many parts of the world. The remedy is the development of adequate financial institutions for the needs of all classes of people rather than the attempt to prohibit or even to limit the taking of interest. The complex structure of lending institutions in a developed society—banks, building societies, land banks, cooperative banks, credit unions, and so on—testifies to the reality of the service that the lender provides and that interest pays for. The democratization of credit—that is, the extension of the power of borrowing to all classes in society—was one of the important social movements of the 20th century.