Summary

Delayed gratification is putting off what you’d like to have today to achieve your major goals tomorrow. Every major personal or societal goal demands a high degree of delayed gratification.

Links and References

Life is Hard

Passing Our Debts To Our Children

Charter Schools

Contact

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Transcript

Most of the solutions to the issues we face personally and as a society are pretty straightforward. But hard to implement, requiring, among other things, delayed gratification. Most of us don’t want that for ourselves, and we have let our politicians know it. They know they cannot vote for any solutions that require any kind of delayed gratification, because we will not re-elect them if they do. And nothing gets fixed. Nothing gets done.

A Stanford professor conducted an experiment with 4- and 5-year-olds and marshmallows. He put a marshmallow in front of each kid, saying if they waited for 15 minutes, while he was gone, before eating the marshmallow, they could have a second one. If they ate it, that was it. One now, or two in 15 minutes. A few of the children made it and were tracked over the 40-years of this longitudinal study. Not surprisingly, this group had higher SAT scores, lower levels of abuse and obesity and achieved higher levels of overall success in life. The discipline of delayed gratification works.

Many of us as individuals and our society, our government, are eating the marshmallow. The government, which we get to vote on every two years, continues to back away from advocating the delayed gratification that it would take to solve any one of the many the issues facing our nation today.

National debt, you know, the one we continue to amass and leave to our children and grandchildren. Essentially, we are eating our marshmallow and theirs, leaving them without one. As of the moment, the Federal accounting shows that we owe $21T and it’s mounting fast.

Part of that debt is the money we owe to support Social Security. Life expectations have increased by at least 15 years since its inception, and we continue to add types of recipient and increase the amount paid to those recipients. Yet instead of fixing it, changing the rules so that it will be solvent and lasting, we continue to kick the can down the road. Afraid of even talking about delayed gratification.

Another part of why we are broke and getting broker is Medicaid, which has gone from $200B in 2000, to $600B last year. And it, too, is growing rapidly.

And then there is Medicare. We spent $700B in 2017, and are projected to spend $3T on Medicare alone in 2050. Yet there are calls from seemingly rational people for “Medicare for all!”

Free College. The national cry for free college and forgiven student loans is mounting. But there is no national conversation about working harder to get scholarships, going to a local community college while working 30 hours a week for those first two years, not going to that expensive dream school. And there are no thoughts or advice about spending 30 minutes on Google to see which schools offer the degrees that will pay enough so the graduate can find a well-paying job and meet their post-school debt obligations. Here, by demanding free college, we eating someone else’s marshmallow.

Infrastructure. We all know that our roads and bridges are suffering from lack of extensions even proper maintenance. Why aren’t we fixing them?

The politicians believe that if they talk about anything even remotely related to delayed gratific...