Patient capital
Your parents were right. Patience is a virtue.
The Economist
8 February 2007
By Kurt Kleiner
IN
MODERN economies, inequality is a fact of life. But disparities of
income are a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the species's
existence, humans lived in small foraging bands that had little
material surplus and therefore enjoyed a relatively egalitarian
existence. The invention of agriculture, which generates a surplus that
can be stored and also gives value to land, permitted this to change.
But permission is not prescription. Exactly why some people were able
to accumulate more than others has been something of an anthropological
mystery. The archaeological record is little help, but the main
hypotheses have been luck, intelligence and aggression. These all, of
course, play their part, but now a fourth phenomenon has been added to
the list: patience.
Writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour
Victoria Reyes-Garcia, of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and
her colleagues describe a study they carried out on the Tsimane', a
group of Amerindians who live in Bolivia's slice of the Amazonian
rainforest. Until recently, the Tsimane' were almost entirely cut off
from the rest of Bolivian society. They were not quite
hunter-gatherers—besides hunting and foraging, they also practised
slash-and-burn agriculture—but they did live in self-sufficient
villages, and there was little disparity of income between villagers.
In
the 1970s missionaries started running elementary schools in Tsimane'
villages, and the best students have had the chance to continue their
education in a nearby town. Those who do well can find jobs as village
teachers, or work for government or development organisations. Even
those who manage only a few years' schooling are better placed than
their confrères to work for cattle ranchers and logging companies. As a
result, income inequality in Tsimane' society is as high as that in
Britain (although overall wealth is obviously much lower). Dr
Reyes-Garcia wanted to find out what determines who wins and who loses.
One
phenomenon that is almost unique to humans is deferred gratification—in
other words, patient anticipation of a reward. Dr Reyes-Garcia and her
colleagues therefore guessed that as the Tsimane' became more enmeshed
in modern society, the more patient of them would do better than the
less. The Tsimane's traditional subsistence economy depends on folk
knowledge and learned skills that have quick pay-offs. Formal schooling
does not pay off for years, but opens the door to bigger potential
incomes.
To test their idea, the researchers offered all 151
adults in two Tsimane' villages a choice between receiving a small
amount of money or food immediately, getting a larger amount if they
were willing to wait a week, and getting a larger amount still in
exchange for several months' wait for payment. They found that the more
education a villager had, the longer he was willing to delay
gratification in return for a bigger reward.
Five years later,
Dr Reyes-Garcia and her colleagues came back again. They re-interviewed
100 of their volunteers (the other 51 were unavailable for one reason
or another) and found that those who had shown most patience in the
original experiment had also seen their incomes increase more than
those of their less patient counterparts. The effect was relatively
small—the incomes of the patient had grown 1% a year faster than those
of the impatient. Over a lifetime, though, that adds up to a
significant amount of inequality. The patient, then, could take their
place alongside the lucky, the smart and the violent at the top of
society's heap.