[하이에크 전집 제11권] 편집자 서문 중에서

지은이: Lawrence H. White
출처: Volume Editor's Introduction for F.A. Hayek, Capital and Interest of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek
자료: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~staff/wrkshop_papers/2008-2009%20Papers/White.pdf

※ 완전한 문서는 아니고 해당 서문의 저자가 저술 진행 중에 남긴 중간 원고로 추정.

Planned Contents of the Volume

1926 “Some Remarks on the Problem of Imputation”
1927 “On the Problem of the Theory of Interest”
1932 “Capital Consumption”
1934 “Saving”
1934 “On the Relationship between Investment and Output”
1935 “The Maintenance of Capital”
1936 “Technical Progress and Excess Capacity”
1936 “The Mythology of Capital”
1936 “Utility Analysis and Interest”
1941 “Maintaining Capital Intact: A Reply to Professor Pigou”

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OF WHICH an excerpt:

In his essays on “Capital Consumption” (1932) and “Saving” (1934) Hayek developed the long-run implications of his emerging capital theory, the short-run (cyclical) implications of which he had sketched in Prices and Production (1931). 

In “Capital Consumption” Hayek expressed concerns about the shrinkage of the capital stock in Austria that were shared by other Austrian-school economists, especially Ludwig von Mises and Fritz Machlup. He cites Oskar Morgenstern’s statistical study of the problem for the Austrian Institut fur Konjunkturforschung, published in 1931. Although he does not cite them, Hayek was no doubt aware of some of the other empirical efforts in Vienna to quantify the extent of Austria’s capital consumption. Ludwig von Mises, Engelbert Dollfuss, and Edmund Palla in 1931 produced Bericht uber die Ursachen der Wirtschaftsschwierigkeiten Osterreichs [A Report on the Causes of the Economic Difficulties in Austria]. Nicholas Kaldor, who at that time was a Hayekian, discussed capital consumption in an article on “The Economic Situation of Austria” in the Harvard Business Review (October 1932). Machlup would publish his research on “The Consumption of Capital in Austria” in the Review of Economic Statistics (January 1935).14

Hayek emphasized the point that in equilibrium there is a tradeoff between more consumption and more investment: “the physical quantity of consumer goods per capita can only be increased by consistently devoting a larger part of productive resources to capitalistic investment rather than to immediate consumption.” One can illustrate the tradeoff by drawing a production possibilities frontier between consumption and investment, as Roger Garrison does in his book restating Hayekian macroeconomics, Time and Money. Although the point is simple, Hayek noted that it is implicitly denied by all those economists who “assume that the demand for capital goods changes in proportion to the demand for consumer goods”. The ranks of such economists in 1932 included “underconsumption” theorists of economic depressions, like John Maynard Keynes in his Treatise on Money (1930), which Hayek cited in this connection. Keynes amplified the underconsumption theme in his General Theory (1936). The assumption that consumption and investment move in the same direction has since been taken for granted by Keynesian macroeconomists up to the present day.

The business cycle theory of Hayek’s Prices and Production, as Roger Garrison has emphasized, is a theory of an unsustainable investment boom. [:] 

• The boom is unsustainable because investment expands above the level that can be financed – consistently with the consumption-investment tradeoff – by voluntary saving (abstention from present consumption). 
• What finances the expansion in investment is instead an unwarranted credit expansion. Hayek labels the event “forced saving.” 
• As Roger Garrison has pointed out, such a label unfortunately suggests that producers are compelling an immediate reduction in consumption by bidding resources away from consumers, that the economy remains on the same consumption-investment frontier even during the expansion phase of the business cycle. 
• But an immediate reduction in consumption cannot be reconciled with the fact that the interest rate, the cost of consuming rather than saving, falls at the outset of the credit expansion. 

Garrison’s own restatement of the Mises-Hayek cycle theory, building on Mises’ recognition of “overconsumption” during the early boom, provides greater coherence by recognizing explicitly that credit expansion can temporarily push the economy beyond its sustainable frontier by encouraging “over-full” employment of labor and machines. Unemployment of men and productive capacity fall below their natural rates. During such a credit boom investment can increase without an equivalent (or even any) reduction of consumption.15

In 1932 Hayek had published a “Note on the Development of 'Forced Saving’” that traced the history of the concept among earlier economists. In his 1934 encyclopedia article on

“Saving,” included here, he expanded his categorization of types of saving. Interestingly, the article criticizes the use of the term “forced saving” as a label for the phenomenon that Hayek himself had used it to label, calling such usage “an instance of the misleading practice of treating the term [saving] as equivalent to ‘capital formation’.”