4. Which is the more important for the rate of interest, the amount of money in the banks or the amount of goods in the country?
5. How would the rate of interest be affected if the amount of money were doubled at once?
Note.—In an interesting article on "Prestige Value," by L. M. Keasbey, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, May, 1903, has been developed one phase of the thought in Sec. II, proposition 2.
The very active recent discussion of "the interest problem" has done much to clarify economic theory; but almost the entire recent literature of the subject (as seen from our point of view) is based on a defective concept of capital. See in Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XVII, pp. 163-180 (November, 1902), article entitled "The 'Roundabout Process' in the Interest Theory," the author's criticism of Böhm-Bawerk's Positive Theory. All the recent "marginal productivity" interest theories are at fault, we venture to say, in trying to derive income from capital instead of deriving the amount of capital from rent.
Chapter 18. Relatively Fixed and Relatively Increasable Forms of Capital
1. Why not raise seals in California and fruit in Alaska?
2. Has the rainfall any relation to the density of population?
3. Has the isothermal line any relation to the number of millionaires?
4. What physical reasons account for the greatness of ancient Egypt, of Venice, of Holland, of England, of the United States?
5. Is all land useful? Is all land wealth?
6 Is there a different term for land that is wealth and land that is not?