Fifty years have passed since the Stanford marshmallow experiment, perhaps the most famous of all psychological tests. Small children were offered a choice between one marshmallow now or two if they could hold off for 15 minutes. (Different times were used over the course of the experiment.)
The willingness to wait turned out to be an extraordinarily good predictor of these children’s life outcomes. The ones with the greatest self-control were the most likely to go to college and get good jobs and the least likely to end up obese or in prison. There is even some suggestion that researchers, by merely carrying out this test, actually improved its subjects’ prospects in later life.
Plainly, not enough of our generation took that test because the years since have seen us give up almost completely on the concept of deferred gratification. Fifty years ago, most people sought financial stability before starting families. There was a stigma attached to buying on credit — or “hire purchase,” as it was often called. Now, everything has to be immediate.
Happy to run up credit card bills, we think nothing of it when our governments do the same. Even before COVID-19, the United States was running a federal deficit of a trillion dollars a year — a number that previous generations would have regarded as impossible.
The defining characteristic of the 21st-century voter is an inability to link action to consequence. We demand green policies, then moan when the price of energy rises. We back business lockdowns, then rage about inflation. We clamor for handouts, subsidies, grants, and sometimes for tax cuts at the same time. I keep thinking of Homer Simpson glugging down a cocktail of vodka and mayonnaise while cheerfully observing, “That’s a problem for Future Homer — man, I don’t envy that guy.”
Consider, for example, Joe Biden’s recent proposal on student debt. It has rightly been criticized on numerous grounds — the president is exceeding his authority, it is unjust for those who go straight to work to subsidize those who don’t, it penalizes those who have paid their debts off, etc. But the most basic objection is this: that offloading that debt will cost each taxpayer around $2,000, completely erasing any gains from the recent attempt at deficit reduction. Does anyone care? Apparently not.
It is the same story all over the democratic world. During the pandemic, governments decreed eye-watering sums in emergency spending with little thought about how to return to previous expenditure levels. Now, all over Europe, governments are responding in the same way to the spike in energy prices, spraying cash around and fixing prices. How can they afford it? That’s a problem for Future Homer — man, I don’t envy that guy.
What has changed? Essentially, our attention spans have shrunk. In 2016, a British think-tanker named Robert Colville wrote The Great Acceleration, a study of how almost everything was speeding up. Urbanization and technology were altering our neural wiring. We were walking faster. We could not concentrate for as long as before. We were swiping distractedly instead of reading. We were becoming addicted to social media and online games that were expressly designed to release dollops of oxytocin in our brains at strategically timed intervals.
These trends have not simply accelerated since 2016; they have accelerated at an accelerating rate.
Faced with such an electorate, what politician will spend now on nuclear reactors that won’t come online for a decade? What government will cut spending so as to bequeath a smaller deficit to its successor? What candidate will offer bitter truths rather than sweet illusions?
Oddly, this tech-driven change is, in many ways, a reversion. Modern civilization rests partly on our readiness to discount present gains for a better future. At some point in the early modern period, human beings began to think longer-term. It may have had to do with literacy or with greater life expectancy. Montesquieu put it down to commerce, Weber to Protestantism. Whatever the explanation, we started to lengthen our gaze — to think in a longer time frame than that which our intuitions, evolved at a time when we were lucky to reach our 40s, supported.
To put it another way, at some point after 1600 A.D., some societies, starting in Western Europe, began to do better at the marshmallow test. And for societies, as for people, the capacity to discount the present, to show self-restraint, was a critical indicator of success. Income began to rise, violent crime began to fall, wars became less frequent.
What if that trend is reversed? What if we vote like demanding children? We will get the society we deserve — and, trust me, we won’t like it.
