Ever since learning about praxeology I have been aware of the role that time preference plays in my decision making. Having a low time preference is essential for improving your life. Do you have any tips for lowering one’s time preference?
Framing decisions in terms of time preference has helped me, but I still struggle with my control over time preference. I listened to a talk given by Hoppe recently where he points out that having a low time preference is correlated with having a high intelligence. Do you think an individual’s time preference is innate or genetic, much like intelligence, or do you think it can be influenced/improved?
Individuals with a low time preference can make much better use of their innate abilities for obvious reasons. This might lead one to believe that LTP is associated with high intelligence, but we really don’t know.
How bad is your time preference problem? If you find it incredibly hard to focus on anything, you might be suffering from ADD. There’s medication to deal with that.
If you would just like to be more future-oriented, try changing your outlook in small steps: do something now and reward yourself with little treats later. Treat yourself for nearly everything first; then gradually cut out treats for minor accomplishments and try to develop a routine. Also, for long-term goals, establish step-by-step plans and reward yourself if necessary. Let us know if that strategy works for you.
I don’t think time preference is genetic or anything like that. But having intelligence is somewhat necessary for judging intertemporal effects of different decisions.
As far as improving time preference, or extending your own time horizons, your can try operant conditioning techniques to train yourself to become more future-oriented.
For some reason, I personally think it’s mostly genetic although both of my mother’s parents were super-low time preference and only two of their five kids are like that. My grandfather was a middle class wage earner, but he had a ton of money left over after he died. My grandmother gave most of her money (half of which was inherited and it would’ve been a lot more than half if she or her mother had converted it to gold; she had just left the money in the bank from about 1966 until about 40 years later) away to the youngest who was super-high time preference. She didn’t intend for him to take it until after she died in case of an emergency, but she had alzheimer’s and she signed it over to him unwittingly. So he took most of it before she died, bought 2 vehicles, and both were repossessed. One of my brothers is super-low time preference, the other is medium preference, but the problem is that the one who is medium time preference doesn’t seem to be too bright in some regards. For example, he thought that gold always costed the same amount of FRNs, so he sold it for less than what it was worth (kind of like what I mentioned above about how my grandmother left $5k in a bank starting in 1966 when she could’ve just bought gold with it at $35/oz). Another example is he has a lot of savings, but he’s not going to pay his house off early because he wants to invest.
I’m thinking that the extremes are probably on the high end of the IQ scale and that the mediums are of average or below average IQ. Think about Jefferson, he was extremely bright, but he had extremely high time preference. It could have something to do with testosterone, but I couldn’t be sure of that.
Time-preference is a function of your capacity to correctly understand the effects of your own actions. If you buy a $5,000 big-screen TV on credit, then have to end up selling your car and riding the bus to work for the next four years to pay for it, including the interest payments, you have probably miscalculated what your own desires are. Purchasing on credit (exhibiting very high time preference) usually comes at the cost of reduced future income. If you fail to correctly calculate the sum total discomfort which you will bear as a result of your high time-preference choice right now, then you have simply (ignorantly) chosen to inflict suffering upon yourself. The remedy is to be less ignorant of the actual future consequences of your actions, that is, to correctly sum and estimate the net total long-run consequences of decisions in the present that have high rewards with apparently moderate long-run costs.
Thanks for the replies. My personal failings with maintaining low time preference come in the form of a lack of interest.
Let’s take school for example. I am in college and I understand that my GPA affects my employability. The past few semesters I have maintained a good GPA, 3.00-3.67 so maybe I have overcome this somewhat, but we’ll keep it as an example. So, I know what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how to do it, but I have trouble with actually doing it. I can find all sorts of reasons for not doing the required readings, not studying enough, etc. Part of it is arrogance, thinking that I can do well on pure ability, but part of it is a lack of self-discipine or underestimating the importance of doing those things. I have trouble with making myself do things which I don’t want to do. It could be that I am not fully comprehending the consequences, as Clayton pointed out. Perhaps the solution is to focus on the consequences, and remind myself why I need to do things?
I’ve the exact same problem but I think it stems from more of an experience issue as for me my father was a master engineer so we had a good home to start with so I never felt what it would have been without it. It’s the disconnection of how bad things could have been without it that you have become spoiled I believe. I mean do we stock food to survive a hard winter? Of course we don’t.
I’m studying physics at university level and sometimes I just feel lazy not to go to lectures and do everything by myself because everything is so easy at first but quickly gets worse, fell for it the first couple of times but learned the lessen the hard way.
On solution is to actually sit down and write down what you do now and in the past and what effects they have. Then compare it with what you want it to be and add stuff on as the week goes on. Sometimes for me at least the effects of things get marginalized in my head compared to when I write them down, maybe it can help others
(VERY long time reader (+4 years) of this forum but never felt I could contribute stuff. yay! xD)
That sounds like simple self-discipline and it’s very easy to improve with behavorial conditioning, allowing you to have great control over your time preference. This involves planning, and sticking your plans to accomplish task a before you allow yourself to have reward b.
