Essays on capital and interest

the long version

In Essays on Capital and Interest Israel Kirzner offers a consistently 'Austrian' perspective on the problems of capital and interest theory. In the three classic essays featured in this book, Professor Kirzner argues that an Austrian approach based on the pure time-preference theory offers an attractive alternative to both the orthodox neoclassical and the heterodox Sraffian approaches to economics. The author takes a subjectivist point of view with all capital and interest phenomenon traced to individual multiperiod plans. Capital is seen, in this perspective, not as an objective mass of tools and equipment, but as the interim state in which inter-locking multiperiod plans have manifested themselves at a particular point. This consistent subjectivism makes it possible to present the pure time (Fetter-Mises) preference theory of interest in understandable terms.