CH. 9 THE PROPENSITY TO CONSUME: II 109

(iii) The motive of improvement—to secure a graduallyincreasing income, which, incidentally, will protectthe management from criticism, since increasingincome due to accumulation is seldom distin-guished from increasing income due to efficiency;

(iv) The motive of financial prudence and the anxietyto be“on the right side” by making a financialprovision in excess of user and supplementary cost,so as to discharge debt and write off the cost ofassets ahead of, rather than behind, the actual rateof wastage and obsolescence, the strength of thismotive mainly depending on the quantity andcharacter of the capital equipment and the rate oftechnical change.

Corresponding to these motives which favour thewithholding of a part of income from consumption,there are also operative at times motives which leadto an excess of consumption over income. Several ofthe motives towards positive saving catalogued aboveas affecting individuals have their intended counterpartin negative saving at a later date, as, for example, withsaving to provide for family needs or old age. Un-employment relief financed by borrowing is best re-garded as negative saving.

Now the strength of all these motives will varyenormously according to the institutions and organisa-tion of the economic society which we presume, accord-ing to habits formed by race, education, convention,religion and current morals, according to present hopesand past experience, according tothescale and techniqueof capital equipment, and according to the prevailingdistribution of wealth and the established standards oflife. In the argument of this book, however, we shallnot concern ourselves, except in occasional digressions,with the results of far-reaching social changes or withthe slow effects of secular progress. We shall, that isto say, take as given the main background of subjective