§10. The Personal and Impersonal Influences on Impatience

By the aid of this map we can see, anew, and more clearly, that a man's actual degree of impatience depends on two circumstances:

(1) It depends on his "personal equation," the whole contour of his whole family of Willingness curves, representing what he would be willing to do under all sorts of income situations. The Willingness lines of a spendthrift are steeper and those of a miser less steep than the typical, or normal, man's family of curves.

(2) It depends on his particular income situation on the map which is represented by the letter P. A poor man is more impatient than a rich man of the same personal characteristics. A man with great expectations for the future but with little available for the present is more impatient than the man oppositely situated with respect to the future.

Both the family of Willingness lines and the position on the map are, of course, changing every minute. Only at one particular time does the map, with its set of curves for Individual 1, and a particular location P1, picture his individual circumstances. What we are doing here is to take a flash-light, as it were, of his income situation and his Willingness lines, and to analyze his behavior at the instant.

Edition: current; Page: [250]