ABSTRACT
The practical way in which the discrepancies between desire and satisfaction work themselves out to the injury of economic welfare is by checking the creation of new capital and encouraging people to use up existing capital to a degree that larger future advantages are sacrificed for smaller present ones. A number of other large undertakings, such as works of afforestation or water supply, the return to which is distant, are similarly handicapped by the slackness of desire towards distant satisfactions. This same slackness of desire towards the future is also responsible for a tendency to wasteful exploitation of Nature’s gifts. Sometimes people will win what they require by methods that destroy, as against the future, much more than they themselves obtain. The inevitable result is that efforts directed towards the remote future are starved relatively to those directed to the near future, while these in turn are starved relatively to efforts directed towards the present.
