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Why wealth and patience appear to go hand in hand
- sunstone 7y agoI'm definitely surprised not to see Japan amongst the most patient.
- gshdg 7y agoThis seems to suggest that the correlation means hat patience causes wealth; but why assume the causation isn’t in the other direction?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- goodJobWalrus 7y agoThere certainly is causality here. If you are patient and invest your money long-term instead of spending it all, you will literally be wealthier than if you spent it all. Of course, there is causality the other way round as well, that is, a basic level of stability and wealth allows you to save.
- pessimizer 7y agoThe more wealth you have, 1) the more likely you have absolutely no desire to spend it all right now and 2), the more likely you're spending money on things that are just as likely to appreciate as depreciate; that can't be called patience. Spending on disposable goods doesn't scale linearly with wealth. That's why consumption taxes are regressive.
- michaelt 7y agoIf the 'Stanford marshmallow experiment' [1] is to be believed, patience (well, control of delayed gratification) at age 3-5 is correlated with educational attainment, BMI and even divorce rate in adulthood. (Note also that subsequent studies [2] found much less significant results than the famous study - and another study [3] found evidence of, as you say, a reversed correlation.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impulse-control-marshmallow-test-fails-in-new-research https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impu... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...
- twoquestions 7y agoIt's looking more like wealth leads to increased patience, not the other way around. Intuitively this makes sense to me, as if you're food-insecure waiting for a better deal that probably won't come is irrational. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall... The paper referenced in the article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761876166...
- beat 7y agoThat was exactly my thought as well. Their causality chain looks completely backwards to me.
- gwern 7y agoEr, the paper cited shows that intelligence (and proxies thereof, like family background, as intelligence/SES are heritable) is prior to the marshmallow test and also predicts patience/success in the marshmallow test. Kids aren't wealthy or not, so that can't possibly be the causal mechanism...
- lalaland1125 7y agoThe parents of the kids can be poor though which might lead to a lack of food in the home.
- zepto 7y agoKids are of course wealthy because they share in the wealth of their family.
- Bartweiss 7y agoThe issue is that it's patience at age 4, so kids have had maybe two years to learn even very basic expectation-and-outcome patterns. The effect people often describe where adult poverty teaches you to spend now before you lose your money isn't going to have kicked in yet. That doesn't rule out food insecurity or other unfulfilled commitments teaching kids this result, but it has to be something earlier and more subtle than the established patterns of wealth in adults.
- cylinder 7y agoPretty sure it's the other way around when we want to talk causality here. Wealth allows you to think long term because your short term needs are met and your children are safe.
- jbb123 7y agoI think the correlation likely works both ways. Being wealthy makes it more easier to be patient. But also being patient helps generate wealth.
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y agoYou can't be patient when basic needs aren't being met, and opportunities to meet them are rare and fleeting.
- rtkwe 7y agoYep and that problem becomes way more clear when you read the supplemental material that includes the actual question for measuring 'patience' [0 page 12-13]: They were given 5 rounds of the question "Would you take 100 Euro now or X euro in 12 months" Where X starts at 151 and goes through the tree on page 13 to assign you a patience score. The less you were willing to accept to wait 12 months the more patient you are. This is clearly going to be affected a lot by how much 100 euros is relative to your current living situation. [0] https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/qje/133/4/10.1093_qje_qjy013/5/qjy013_supplemental_file.pdf?Expires=1564656841&Signature=p1Dj67CbYBZIqvz0zdlLcUjtCclHbE6VedfxLA1pPNSpT8rHiMILaSQqNuN02yZI~On8EzpQbLF0lTYth-k-6gH~46IwNQoWJWihgSkgTFmGD4jd1tt-PqQFYmjivrrJtX-ckl3OTXMMKseUHtjC3R4375ZeFi4if5KGhLvT90i8PQpx1YU0dtuwpQKWrDwvjr5txo22z2suHNSzR7Cbx9mhuM~LJVnbGjvjcQzwkRlORV7Lm4IfMf-idKzexR8DkzO2wQoj5Q9XKCLuDI1Lv5ldaTNGmrkNArmayam0w7j69HCWFqOhCuCF6MZErVm9Yq1eUf~rb21CzCkhD-ap5g__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/...
- mruts 7y agoI live in a poor African country, and even here, people choose to buy things instead of their basic needa being met. Meat instead of beans, alcohol, weed, cigarettes, etc. They rather go hungry and get drunk than have a lot of bland food. There are some people who might be close to starving, but they’re a small minority. In the US these people are virtually non-existant. Even homeless people manage to hustle over $100/day. And they don’t spend that money on food, either.
- 7y ago
- pflenker 7y agoAs someone who has been very poor for quite some time, and is now doing quite well, I can tell you first-hand that my patience has improved a lot. The most obvious reason is that I am now at the liberty to not do certain things, not accept certain deals and so on.
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoI have a theory that one major but hard to quantify benefit of a Universal Basic Income would be that more people would gain the sort of patience you describe. Based on your own experience, would you think that, say, $1000/month as is being proposed in the States these days would make a difference in that direction?
- pflenker 7y agoThat's hard to answer, because it depends on the prices in the area where you are. The number needs to be high enough so that if you have paid for rent, food, clothes and so on, you still have a tiny amount left over to save for emergencies. It's the complete lack of any savings that can make you very nervous and impatient. For example, if my washing machine breaks down, I have the resources to call a mechanic, use a laundromat or even buy a new one. When I was poor, a broken washing machine meant dirty clothes and having to not buy something else until I can afford the mechanic. You can probably guess that under these circumstances it would be very hard to stay patient with the mechanic if he does a poor job, or if he can't fix it for some reason.
- opencl 7y agoI think it's important to note that the measure of "patience" is this survey question: "Please consider the following: Would you rather receive 100 Euro today or x Euro in 12 months?" posed with x varying between 103 and 212. Seems a hell of a lot more meaningful than the "marshmallow experiment" that I was afraid the article would be about but also like it would very obviously skew towards labeling rich people as more patient. The linked article is pretty devoid of meaningful content but the survey is relatively interesting.
- ginko 7y agoIf that's the question, then I'm not surprised when wealthier people score as more patient: They don't need the money now, so might as well wait it out for a higher payout.
- IshKebab 7y agoRight, that question is pretty much asking you directly if you are poor (or stupid I guess).
- LanceH 7y agoWhat a horrible experiment, too. You could conclude that wealthier people are more able to trust commitment over time. In a $100 context, I would be considered wealthy, but I still might take $100 now just because who knows where this guy will be a year from now. This is measuring time value of money versus risk, imo. Time value of money is also different for someone without money, as well. 100 Euro might buy a quality item now that will last, instead of a cheap version that needs to be replace multiple times in a year. When I think of patience and building wealth, my first thought is always the college grads who get recruited from university and immediately go out and buy a really nice car. A lot of them even had perfectly functional cars going into their first jobs. In fact, several of them when to work for consulting firms where their nice new cars would be sitting at the airport parking lot 5 days out of every week. Put off that fancy car just a bit and then you can have that little nest egg which will kick off that patience<->wealth feedback loop.
- 7y ago
- stevens32 7y agoPatience is measured here by the question "Would you rather receive 100 Euros today or x Euros in 12 months" [0] -- when I was broke, I definitely would've said 100 today at just about any x value. Now, going through the tree I guess my patience has gone up significantly [0] Link under Table I in https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/4/1645/5025666#136862141 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/4/1645/5025666#1368...
- pnutjam 7y agoEconomics is pseudo-science at best. There are no perfect markets, and thus no ability to test theories. It's no surprise that "studies" continue to prove how much better the wealthy are, or how the middle class worked hard, and people with money deserve it. Economists have to get paid too.
- 49531 7y agoI think the fact that business school exists at all should be our first clue that Economics is mostly pseudo-science. It has little material value aside from propagandizing the ideas of the wealthy.
- Ambele 7y agoI disagree. I hold an unusual opinion that all congress members should be required to take an economics class before assuming office because they literally are the ones running our economy. Learning economics helps your thought process in many ways and makes you a better decision maker when it comes to deciding on micro and macroeconomic policies. Weighing benefits, negative externalities, and costs when making investments or policies is exactly what economics trains you best for. Our brains are not designed for decision making involving large numbers of people or large sums of money and by default we fall back on making emotional decisions based on anecdotal experiences. The teaching of Economics helps keep your logic side front and center and allows you to make better, more efficient, and more impactful decisions at lower social and economic costs than would be arrived at by default. Are you able to understand the implications and effects of taxes and government spending when there are 2 trillion dollar deficits instead of 2 billion dollar deficits? Economics-style thinking is very valuable. If you weren't blessed to have had a great economics professor in your high-school and college years, I recommend reading Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. It was a required reading for my AP economics course and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it cover-to-cover.
- pnutjam 7y agoEconomics is good to learn, just like other theories. My problem is when it's used to "prove" things.