THE THEORY OF INTEREST

everybody else in the market, we shall still be one equa-tion short. This is equivalent to saying that the secondset of conditions (Impatience Principle B) is not enough.

In a market comprising 1000 persons there will be, asour unknowns, not only the rate of interest, but 1000 ratesof impatience, and the additions to or deductions fromthe income of these 1000 persons in each period of time.The rate of interest and these thousands of variablesact and react on each other and the determination ofeach can be accomplished only with the determinationof all the rest.

In Chapter XII this problem is stated in mathematicalformulas such that the number of equations is exactlyequal to the number of unknown quantities.