This is probably one of the biggest redpills and yet no one seems to talk about it.
Time preference is the relationship between the present value of a good and its expected future value.
Time preference dictates the rate at which civilization is created. Current consumption is traded for a lengthier and more capital-intensive production process, resulting in an increased output for future goods.
What this means is this: the higher an individual's (and society's) time preference, the lower the rate of civilization and technological advancement there will be.
As individuals sacrifice current consumption (immediate gratification) for future consumption (lengthier production), the increased output in goods will reflect itself in a better well being of society, and time preference rates and degrees will lower.
The more you save, the more expensive whores you'll afford.
Anthony Turner
When Crusoe woke up on his island, his surrounding of scare resources, as well as limited time for him to act (otherwise he'd starve to death), translated in a tremendously high time preference. Therefore, Crusoe constructed a fishing rod or a fishing spear. He could have constructed a much more efficient and effective fishing net, but his time preference rate was so high that he simply could have not. As Crusoe catched fish and learned of his surroundings, his time preference rate fell, enabling him to start to construct ever more complex contraptions.
What does this have to do with politics and the red pill? Well, it sheds light on why Africa is such a shithole and Europe is not. Africans have a much higher time preference than Caucasian Europeans. This is the reason why they do not construct complex creations or live with a high degree of well being. As the time preference point moves up and left of the curve, approaching the Y axis, human beings (if we can still call them that way) relegate themselves into living a mere animal and primitive existence. On the other hand, the lower and right of the curve the time preference point moves, production and capital formation will rise, triggering the process of civilization.
Grayson Cook
We have put being busy before being useful to society. If we just concentrated on those jobs that are useful to civilization, we would not need foreigners in our nations. Plenty of vanity jobs, especially among women.
Joseph Roberts
An incredibly important cognitive trait indeed. Probably more important than IQ.
Isaiah Stewart
The point of this thread is to make you anons see that Africans and other lesser beings are destructive (or at least indifferent) to civilization. Their presence in civilized society, most of the times, causes crime. Crime in turn negatively affects the time preference rate of productive citizens. The time preference rate is immediately higher because of the destruction of capital and consumer goods, and the time preference schedule is also negatively affected (higher), because scarce resources will have to be deviated from their optimum production process and employed in the production of defense services and protection, which would've otherwise not happened.
Now it is true that the mere presence of low time preference individuals is beneficial to high time preference individuals. The latter can seek guidance, knowledge or even imitate the formers' way of life. But when you dump high time preference individuals in a civilized society without any care (open borders, refugee programs) the outcome is systematically negative and may even lead to a permanent derailment of the process of civilization.
Levi Ramirez
Every man begins his life with a tremendously high time preference. The cognitive limitations of babies and children, allied with their lack of perception of time and living time span, means they live from one instant gratification to another. It is only during growing up, when one learns about how the world functions, one's estimated living span and other uses of capital and resources, than time preference rates and schedules lower.
During the course of one's adult life, his time preference is most likely the lowest it will ever be. A man will work to save, invest and have a family: all time consuming activities that require the sacrifice of present gratification for future rewards. Time preference again rises at the end of one's life, when the end is near and therefore capital accumulation may no longer prove useful. Unless one has heirs or children.
Cooper Bennett
True, but while a person's immediate level of time preference can be influenced by his circumstances, time preference is also to a large extent passed on as a genetic trait. Trials with small children have also shown that those that can resist instant gratification are much more likely to be successful later in life.
Tyler Hughes
>As individuals sacrifice current consumption (immediate gratification) for future consumption (lengthier production), the increased output in goods will reflect itself in a better well being of society, and time preference rates and degrees will lower.
Not if he made a bad decision because the manipulation of interest rates, like going to college or the .com bubble
Mason Ortiz
Hold on, nigger.
Your theory presumes that abatement of individual pursuits for any sort of collectivist gain will result in a healthier society.
This is demonstrably false when taking environmental destruction from corporate industrial CO2 emissions into account.
Collectivism at the expense of individual lifestyles will not invariably act as a net positive for societies or the world as a whole.
James Richardson
>Your theory presumes that abatement of individual pursuits for any sort of collectivist gain will result in a healthier society. OP said nothing about individual pursuits or collectivist gain.
This is about the length of delay for individual gratification.
Charles Parker
Yes indeed. Genetic differences between races go deeper than just IQ. Because it's easy to measure and the effect is so large the IQ trait has received the most attention in talk about racial differences.
But besides IQ there are countless other traits ranging from physical, physiological and cognitive abilities that are significantly different in prevalence between races. The make-up of traits present in a population are also a large influence on, and determinant of the kind of culture (broadly speaking) that population will produce.
Robert Martin
>This is about the length of delay for individual gratification.
Consider the heuristics involved here, and you'll understand my commentary.
Time preference is a facet of the individualist/collectivist dichotomy.
Landon Long
Next, you have to know that both people and other animals don't discount outcomes exponentially but hyperbolically, This means that our preferences across time are not consistent: that is, if you say you prefer A to B now, nothing guarantees you won't prefer the opposite in the future, even if your preferences over all possible instances of time are the same (e.g. I prefer to eat healthy tomorrow rather than junk food, but a day after I will prefer to eat junk food).
Xavier Reed
Bumping because I agree albeit with a qualifier - high-time preference societies, CAN, given long periods of time, slowly shift into lower time preferences, and therefore become more civilized. That said, they CANNOT do so IF first world countries regularly send "aid" and intervene in theose countries' affairs. This disrupts the natural process of selection that culls high-time preference people into, eventually, low time-preference people.
This is why human rights policing and foreign aid is such a joke, and is actually harming those countries. Africa will never, ever advance is whitey is always there to give him food if he gets hungry for a day.
Eli Lopez
What book is this time preference theory from?
Joseph Robinson
Absolutely! Welfare is dysgenic without adequate measures to prevent it. Standard "free money" type welfare is like sawing of your legs to eat even though there's food up ahead if you would just expend some effort.
Joseph Edwards
Austrian economics incorporates this concept in depth. I personally saw it laid out quite good and in detail by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in "Democracy The God that Failed"
Daniel Martin
Traditional time preferences is standard microeconomics since the 30's. Before, there were some textual descriptions of it but nothing formalized yet. To read it, just open any standard intermediate to advanced book on microeconomics. Something like Varian will probably do. What I talked about comes from behavioral economics and is rather new (less than 40 years old). Search for hyperbolic discounting and inconsistent time preferences in Google Scholar. There are also theories explaining why hyperbolic discounting yields more fitness than the exponential one.
Wyatt Collins
Be careful about Austrian economics. It's very similar to the simplest form of microconomics but since they refuse to get mathematical there are a lot of unchecked assumptions. The intuition is mostly right but it can give you a completely autistic view of the economy, precisely due to the small but pervasive details which are constantly being ignored.
Juan Cook
Indeed. Welfare expropriates wealth from productive ("good") people -- the haves -- and gives it to the unproductive, lazy, incompetent, unhealthy and undesirable ("bad") -- the have-nots. Therefore, the incentive to be a producer of "goods" is reduced; success is punished. Wealth is expropriated and given to the non-producers, the parasitic class; and the production of "bads" increases.
Mason Green
wow, you just discovered production possibility curve
no shit that you can spend more later if you save now, it's literally first kiddy step into econ 101
Time preference has been ignored outside of Austrian economics, what are you talking about?
Alexander Bennett
You must not see everything in terms of markets and pure incentives because incomplete markets are not the exception but the rule. This is good intuition if you're starting out but you are at risk of making terrible decisions if you implement actual policy.
A simple counterpoint to what you said is that of seeing welfare as a way to promote stability. If there are stark differences between people within a society (very heterogeneous society), the social capital in your country will tank. This social capital is the basis of all institutions within a society that involve the interaction between people. It is often included as "technology" or "total factor productivity" in the simplest macro production functions. So, completing disregarding inequality or social welfare, is akin to decreasing the amount of capital in your country. So, you can perfectly have policies based on equality increasing efficiency.
