§10. The Personal Factor Summarized

Impatience for income, therefore, depends for each individual on his income, on its size, time shape, and probability; but the particular form of this dependence differs according to the various characteristics of the individual. The characteristics which will tend to make his impatience great are: (1) short-sightedness, (2) a weak will, (3) the habit of spending freely, (4) emphasis upon the shortness and uncertainty of his life, (5) selfishness, or the absence of any desire to provide for his survivors, (6) slavish following of the whims of fashion. The reverse conditions will tend to lessen his impatience; namely, (1) a high degree of foresight, which enables him to give to the future such attention as it deserves; (2) a high degree of self-control, which enables him to abstain from present real income in order to increase future real income; (3) the habit of thrift; (4) emphasis upon the expectation of a long life; (5) the possession of a family and a high regard for their welfare after his death; (6) the independence to maintain a proper balance between outgo and income, regardless of Mrs. Grundy and the high-powered salesmen of devices that are useless or harmful, or which commit the purchaser beyond his income prospects.

The resultant of these various tendencies in any one individual will determine the degree of his impatience at a given time, under given conditions with a particular income stream. The result will differ as between individuals, and at different times for the same individual.

The same individual in the course of his life may Edition: current; Page: [90] change from one extreme of impatience to the other. Such an alteration may be caused by a change in the person's nature (as when a spendthrift is reformed or a man, originally prudent, becomes, through intemperance, reckless and thriftless), or by variation in his income, whether in respect to size, distribution in time, or uncertainty. Everyone at some time in his life doubtless changes his degree of impatience for income. In the course of an ordinary lifetime the changes in a man's degree of impatience are probably of the following general character: as a child he will have a high degree of impatience because of his lack of foresight and self-control; when he reaches the age of young manhood he may still have a high degree of impatience, but for a different reason, namely, because he then expects a large future income. He expects to get on in the world, and he will have a high degree of impatience because of the relative abundance of the imagined future as compared with the realized present. When he gets a little further along, and has a family, the result may be a low degree of impatience, because then the needs of the future rather than its endowment will appeal to him. He will not think that he is going to be so very rich; on the contrary, he will wonder how he is going to get along with so many mouths to feed. He looks forward to the future expenses of his wife and children with the idea of providing for them—an idea which makes for a high relative regard for the future and a low relative regard for the present. Then when he gets a little older, if his children are married and have gone out into the world and are well able to take care of themselves, he may again have a high degree of impatience for income, because he expects to die, and he thinks, "Instead of piling up for the remote future, why Edition: current; Page: [91] shouldn't I enjoy myself during the few years that remain?"