Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/141

assumption of the rôle of creditor on a larger scale than any other country has yet undertaken. The policy of indefinite postponement of satisfactions to which a people is entitled seems absurd, and would be impossible if it represented the conduct of a people as a whole. But if we envisage large amounts of surplus class income, carrying no appreciable satisfaction from current expenditure, and therefore rolling up into automatic savings whose interest is subjected to a similar accumulation, we can understand how this group control of savings and investment may bring about a long continued career of increasing creditorship. One nation may thus be induced and enabled to save an indefinitely large proportion of its income, provided other nations are thereby induced to spend more and save less.

It sometimes appears as if there were no limit to the proportion of the world-income that might be saved except what may be termed the physiological limit of subsistence. For there is, it is contended, no limit to the amount of useful new developmental work that may be set on foot with a view to enlarged production of future commodities. But this is also true of Crusoe. If he is fool enough, he may work so hard in making precarious preparations for the future that he gets no satisfaction out of the present. But as an intelligent man he sets a right limit upon this process of postponing present and more certain to future and less certain satisfaction. And the world as a whole is in the position of Crusoe. As far as it is guided by reasonable self-interest, it will limit the proportion of the saving to its spending, not deferring present satisfaction to an excessive