Roundaboutness, or roundabout methods of production, is the process whereby

capital goods In economics, capital goods or capital are "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production" of goods and services. A typical example is the machinery used in a factory. At the macroeconomic level, ...

are produced first and then, with the help of the capital goods, the desired consumer goods are produced.Roundaboutness states that more time-intensive and capital-rich methods of production may lead to greater long run productivity, even if in the short run they are less productive. This idea ties closely to other ideas on the time value of money and interest rates, where interest is a premium paid for deferring consumption in the present. An argument against Böhm-Bawerk's theory of roundaboutness, in economies with compound interest, was presented by

Paul Samuelson Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "h ...

during the Cambridge capital controversy. The concept, interpreted as rising technical composition of capital, is also used by some Marxian authors.For example John R. Bell: Capitalism and the Dialectic - The Uno-Sekine Approach to Marxian Political Economy. London, New York 2009, p.106.

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Austrian School {{Econ-stub