My latest column for @Locusmag is "Marshmallow Longtermism"; it's a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as standards-bearers for deferred gratification and hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality:
https://locusmag.com/2024/09/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight
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Conservatives often root our societal ills in a childish impatience, and cast themselves as wise adults who understand that "you can't get something for nothing." Think here of the memes about lazy kids who would rather spend on avocado toast and fancy third-wave coffee rather than paying off their student loans. In this framing, poverty is a consequence of immaturity.
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To be a functional adult is to be sober in all things: not only does a grownup limit their intoxicant intake to head off hangovers, they also go to the gym to prevent future health problems, they save their discretionary income to cover a down-payment and student loans.
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This isn't asceticism,: it's a mature decision to delay gratification. Avocado toast is a reward for a life well-lived: once you've paid off your mortgage and put your kid through college, then you can have that oat-milk latte. This is just "sound reasoning": every day you fail to pay off your student loan represents another day of compounding interest. Pay off the loan first, and you'll save many avo toasts' worth of interest and your net toast consumption can go way, way up.
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Cleaving the world into the patient (the mature, the adult, the wise) and the impatient (the childish, the foolish, the feckless) does important political work. It transforms every societal ill into a personal failing: the prisoner in the dock who stole to survive can be recast as a deficient whose partying on study-nights led to their failure to achieve the grades needed for a merit scholarship, a first-class degree, and a high-paying job.
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Dividing the human race into "the wise" and "the foolish" forms an ethical basis for hierarchy. If some of us are born (or raised) for wisdom, then naturally those people should be in charge. Moreover, putting the innately foolish in charge is a recipe for disaster. The political scientist Corey Robin identifies this as the unifying belief common to every kind of conservativism: that some are born to rule, others are born to be ruled over:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#healthy-populism
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This is why conservatives are so affronted by affirmative action, whose premise is that the absence of minorities in the halls of power stems from systemic bias. For conservatives, the fact that people like themselves are running things is evidence of their own virtue and suitability for rule.
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In conservative canon, the act of shunting aside members of dominant groups to make space for members of disfavored minorities isn't justice, it's dangerous "virtue signaling" that puts the childish and unfit in positions of authority.
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Again, this does important political work. If you are ideologically committed to deregulation, and then a giant, deregulated sea-freighter crashes into a bridge, you can avoid any discussion of re-regulating the industry by insisting that we are living in a corrupted age where the unfit are unjustly elevated to positions of authority. That bridge wasn't killed by deregulation - it's demise is the fault of the DEI hire who captained the ship:
https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-dei-utah-lawmaker-phil-lyman-misinformation
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The idea of a society made up of the patient and wise and the impatient and foolish is as old as Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper," but it acquired a sheen of scientific legitimacy in 1970, with Walter Mischel's legendary "Stanford Marshmallow Experiment":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment
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In this experiment, kids were left alone in a locked room with a single marshmallow, after being told that they would get two marshmallows in 15 minutes, but only if they waited until them to eat the marshmallow before them. Mischel followed these kids for decades, finding that the kids who delayed gratification and got that second marshmallow did better on every axis - educational attainment, employment, and income.
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Adult brain-scans of these subjects revealed structural differences between the patient and the impatient.
For many years, the Stanford Marshmallow experiment has been used to validate the cleavage of humanity in the patient and wise and impatient and foolish. Those brain scans were said to reveal the biological basis for thinking of humanity's innate rulers as a superior subspecies, hidden in plain sight, destined to rule.
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Then came the "replication crisis," in which numerous bedrock psychological studies from the mid 20th century were re-run by scientists whose fresh vigor disproved and/or complicated the career-defining findings of the giants of behavioral "science." When researchers re-ran Mischel's tests, they discovered an important gloss to his findings.
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By questioning the kids who ate the marshmallows right away, rather than waiting to get two marshmallows, they discovered that these kids weren't impatient, they were rational.
The kids who ate the marshmallows were more likely to come from poorer households. These kids had repeatedly been disappointed by the adults in their lives, who routinely broke their promises to the kids.
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Sometimes, this was well-intentioned, as when an economically precarious parent promised a treat, only to come up short because of an unexpected bill. Sometimes, this was just callousness, as when teachers, social workers or other authority figures fobbed these kids off with promises they knew they couldn't keep.
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The marshmallow-eating kids had rationally analyzed their previous experiences and were making a sound bet that a marshmallow on the plate now was worth more than a strange adult's promise of two marshmallows. The "patient" kids who waited for the second marshmallow weren't so much patient as they were trusting.
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They had grown up with parents who had the kind of financial cushion that let them follow through on their promises, and who had the kind of social power that convinced other adults - teachers, etc - to follow through on their promises to their kids.
Once you understand this, the lesson of the Marshmallow Experiment is inverted.
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The reason two marshmallow kids thrived is that they came from privileged backgrounds: their high grades were down to private tutors, not the choice to study rather than partying. Their plum jobs and high salaries came from university and family connections, not merit. Their brain differences were the result of a life free from the chronic, extreme stress that comes with poverty.
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Post-replication crisis, the moral of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is that everyone experiences a mix of patience and impatience, but for the people born to privilege, the consequences of impatience are blunted and the rewards of patience are maximized.
Which explains a lot about how rich people actually behave. Take Charles Koch, who grew his father's coal empire a thousandfold by making long-term investments in automation.
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Koch is a vocal proponent of patience and long-term thinking, and is openly contemptuous of publicly traded companies because of the pressure from shareholders to give preference to short-term extraction over long-term planning. He's got a point.
Koch isn't just a fossil fuel baron, he's also a wildly successful ideologue.
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Koch is one of a handful of oligarchs who have transformed American politics by patiently investing in a kraken's worth of think tanks, universities, PACs, astroturf organizations, Star chambers and other world-girding tentacles. After decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, court-packing and propagandizing, the American billionaire class has seized control of the US and its institutions. Patience pays!
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@pluralistic I first heard of the marshmallow test when it was trotted out in a school assembly as a moral fable for us to learn from. I've been low-key angry about that ever since I found out what it was really testing.
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@johnayliff @pluralistic
It's really kind of amazing how often assertions of "moral character", when tested empircally, turn out to be questions of access & privilege.
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@johnayliff @pluralistic Huh. New personal rule: If I hear something called "The Stanford...", I automatically dismiss its findings, forevermore.
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@pluralistic
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you're halfway there - it's not just poor people who lie to their kids, though, FFS, that logic obviously applies for all kids and something else made the rich kids perform the test better, like the fact that they could leave and buy all the damned marshmallows they wanted when it was over or something. The rich ones more expect some reward for giving the adults the "right," answer, some answer that transcends the test.
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Little old time WEIRDness leaking in there. 😇
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@pluralistic All this is a legacy of the (Protestant) Calvinist colonizers who brought their perverted belief in predestination with them.
According to their belief system, a few are the Elect, chosen (by their idea of a god) to prosper and go to heaven, while others, for no apparent reason, are to be punished by poverty in life, and in death, an eternity in hell. Thus, there is no reason to treat the poor, sick, or disabled with compassion, because they are lesser beings and already condemned. All is based on faith alone, and good works are a waste of resources.
Note that the old Catholic tradition of "the poor are always with us" encouraged alms-giving and charity in life as "good works" to get into heaven.
So, welcome to the New Calvinism, same as the old.
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@c_merriweather @pluralistic
Do I want to know how they squared that with, you know, the actual teachings of Christ?
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@cavyherd @pluralistic Very poorly. Something about a rich man not getting into heaven...
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@pluralistic
I've never gone from "Marshmallow? What marshmallow?" to "Oh, fuck, THAT marshmallow" so quickly.
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Marshmallow Longtermism
My impression is that your essay greatly understates the extent to which longtermism has primarily come to refer to an absolutely bonkers ideology which when it comes to the substance of it has absolutely nothing to do with delayed gratification or real concern for the long term.
Either way it's much less agreeable than champagne socialism.
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@pluralistic @Locusmag
@BlumeEvolution
Eine großartige Kolumne, die nicht nur das berühmte Marshmallow-Experiment entzaubert, sondern auch viel über das Wesen des Konservativismus und die Männer, die die Welt verbrennen, enthält.
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@pluralistic @Locusmag
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Solid, well done.
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It's a matter of neurotype, I think, my man is an Allistic genius - so he is deficient in the actuarial sense, a savant at controlling people and money, a broken child at understanding the world he creates with his actions.
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