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icon:: 📖 purchased:: Sep 24th, 2023 start:: Sep 24th, 2023 end:: published:: length:: author:: @Saifedean Ammous cover:: reading-time:: score:: - #Thoughts - #Jun 29th, 2022 - Block Reference Robert Reffkin’s contradiction: I am always thinking of the future; better tomorrow vs Move fast now and show me the results today. Give it to me now! Today. Right now. - Progressive Summarizations - Time Preference id:: 62a12290-3305-4133-aac6-25475f2c3e62 collapsed:: true - Time preference refers to the ratio at which individuals value the present compared to the future. - Instead of spending all our time producing goods for immediate consumption, we can choose to spend time engaged in production of goods that will take longer to complete, if they are superior goods. - in other words, to create capital goods. - Whereas animals and humans can both hunt, humans differentiated themselves from animals by spending time developing tools for hunting. - TODO add to software wisdom; in software we make products and make our own tools - Thus - software stack #boom - This is the essence of investment: as humans delay immediate gratification, they invest their time and resources in the production of capital goods which will make production more sophisticated or technologically advanced and extend it over a longer time-horizon. id:: 62c05633-c8cb-4a9e-8876-bbd7add981a2 - investment raises the productivity of the producer. - The fisherman who builds a fishing rod is able to catch more fish per hour than the fisherman hunting with his bare hands. - But the only way to build the fishing rod is to dedicate an initial amount of time to work that does not produce edible fish, but instead produces a fishing rod. - This is an uncertain process, for the fishing rod might not work and the fisherman will have wasted his time to no avail. Not only does investment require delaying gratification, it also always carries with it a risk of failure, which means the investment will only be undertaken with an expectation of a reward. - The lower an individual's time preference, the more likely he is to engage in investment, to delay gratification, and to accumulate capital. The more capital is accumulated, the higher the productivity of labor, and the longer the time horizon of production. - Block Reference collapsed:: true - For an individual to be willing to defer her receipt of a good by a year, she would have to be offered a larger quantity of the good. - Right! I will accumulate capital or build a productive system if I see its use in future. This is what is #longtermthinking - This is also in essence creating a system vs just checking off goal. #boom #dotsconnected. Thus, #systemvsgoals. System compounds. Requires investment. - This is also lack of #thinking. Most of don’t understand that what we lack most is thinking. - This is also in essence bad strategy. - Everything fucking connects to low time preference. - TODO create a page for low time preference where everything connects - Here is a spiritual angle - you can see why saying you don’t need anything, live in the present can seem counter. It’s not. One is a tool for execution, other is being. The problem is letting the tool use you - you become the tool lol. The mind is using you instead of you using it. am - famous Stanford marshmallow experiment - Animals' time preference is far higher than humans', - Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains that once time preference drops enough to allow for any savings and capital or durable consumer-goods formation at all, the tendency is for time preference to drop even further as a “process of civilization” is initiated. collapsed:: true - As humans reduce their time preference, they develop the scope for carrying out tasks over longer time horizons, for satisfaction of ever-more remote needs, and they develop the mental capacity to create goods not for immediate consumption but for the production of future goods, in other words, to create capital goods. - It is only through the lowering of time preference that individuals begin to appreciate investing in the long run and start prioritizing future outcomes. - A society in which individuals bequeath their children more than what they received from their parents is a civilized society: it is a place where life is improving, and people live with a purpose of making the next generation's lives better. - As society's capital levels continue to increase, productivity increases and, along with it, quality of life. - Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their base needs are met and most pressing dangers averted. - The better the money is at holding its value, the more it incentivizes people to delay consumption and instead dedicate resources for production in the future, leading to capital accumulation and improvement of living standards, while also engendering in people a low time preference in other, non-economic aspects of their life. - The move from money that holds its value or appreciates to money that loses its value is very significant in the long run: society saves less, accumulates less capital, and possibly begins to consume its capital; worker productivity stays constant or declines, resulting in the stagnation of real wages, even if nominal wages can be made to increase through the magical power of printing ever more depreciating pieces of paper money. As people start spending more and saving less, they become more present-oriented in all their decision making, resulting in moral failings and a likelihood to engage in conflict and destructive and self-destructive behavior. - gold, because it cannot be inflated easily and because it forces people to direct their energies away from producing a monetary good and toward producing more useful goods and services. - - Random Highlights - Capitalism is what happens when people drop their time preference, defer immediate gratification, and invest in the future. id:: 62bcb49f-54a6-44f0-9975-f6e4effb8cf4 - the only cause of economic growth in the first place is delayed gratification, saving, and investment, which extend the length of the production cycle and increase the productivity of the methods of production, leading to better standards of living. id:: 62bcb4a6-c593-41b2-9b27-1b71618d74c9