Cory Doctorow: Marshmallow Longtermism

There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness to save, which is to say, in the childish inability to defer gratification.

Think of the cliches about student debt and rental crises: “If you just made coffee and a sandwich at home for break­fast instead of blowing fifteen bucks at a hipster cafe for an oat-milk flat white and artisanal avocado toast, you could have paid off your debts years ago and saved enough for a down payment.” The little luxuries, it seems, are the reward for a life well-lived. Prioritize your spending, youngsters, and put first things first! Pay off that debt, buy that starter home, then celebrate with avocado toast.

Think of the lazy stereotypes about crime: “If you’d had the self-control to sit through your studies instead of squirming and staring off into space, you’d have gotten the grades to qualify for a merit scholarship at a top university and earned a degree that would have greased your path into a lucrative career. Then you wouldn’t need to run around sticking people up for their wallets!”

Conservative ideology assumes that the causal arrow runs from “personal defects” to “poor outcomes”: Poverty and debt are the result of innate failings.

As it happens, this is an empirically testable hypothesis, and it has been tested. The (in)famous “Stanford marshmallow experiment” was originally performed by psychologist Walter Mischel. Mischel’s experimental subjects were children who were seated before a plate containing a single marshmallow. They were told that if they resisted the temptation to eat the marshmallow during the experiment, they’d be given two marshmallows at its conclusion.

The children were then left alone with the marshmallow for 15 minutes. Mischel followed his subjects for decades, finding that the kids who had the self-discipline to resist eating the marshmallow enjoyed better life outcomes on a number of axes: They got better grades and better jobs, and enjoyed higher incomes. Eventual brain-imaging studies revealed structural dif­ferences in the brains of the adults who, as children, were able to resist the marshmallow’s siren song.

This experiment is widely heralded as vindication for the conservative hypothesis about self-control and life-chances, and those brain images are the clincher: “Look, some of us are born with better brains, and we do better. Our superior position in society reflects our superior neurological makeup, which allows us to vividly imagine the future and plan for it accordingly. You can’t argue with science.”

But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal impor­tant details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier back­grounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.

The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.

So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and con­cluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. At the very least, it foreclosed on the possibility that the adults running the experiment would come back in 15 minutes and declare that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were taking back the original marshmallow, rather than providing two of them. They were thinking about the future, in other words.

These kids didn’t grow up to do worse in school and life because they lacked self-control: Those outcomes were dictated by America’s two-tier education system, which funds schools based on local property taxes, topped up by parental donations, which means that poor neighborhoods get poor schools. If these kids’ brains show up differently on a scan 20 years later, Occam’s Razor dictates that this is caused by a life of desperation and precarity, whose stresses are compounded by inadequate health-care.

Which means that the “patient” kids weren’t demonstrat­ing “self-control” – rather, their willingness to wait for a second marshmallow reflected a charmed life in which adults came through with the goodies they promised. That same charmed life saw those subjects enrolled in the best schools, backstopped by tutors and college application consultants, significant parental financial contributions to excellent postsecondary education, and smooth entry into the job market.

In other words: Eating the marshmallow doesn’t doom you to a life of misery. The kids who ate the marshmallow were doomed when they arrived at the experimenter’s lab – which is why they ate the marshmallow.

Which is not to say that self-control is irrelevant to one’s life chances. Most of the good things in my life – especially my writing career – are due to my self-control, that is, my ability to imagine a future in which my delayed gratifica­tion (writing my latest book rather than vegging in front of the TV) motivates me to do something that is onerous in the moment, but glorious in retrospect.

Nor am I arguing that the wealthy can’t attribute some of their success to self control. Charles Koch – the surviving Koch brother – inherited a coal business from his father, but once he had his hands on its controls, he grew it a thousandfold. He did so by making long-term investments in automa­tion technologies with extremely long amortization schedules – gadgets that might take 20 years to pay for themselves – and increasing the productivity of the business to a degree unmatched in the sector. He exercised patience and self-control, delaying the gratification of taking money out of the business to spend on himself, choosing instead to shrewdly reinvest it. In so doing, he became unimaginably wealthy.

Koch is one of the leading proponents of the theory that one’s position in society reflects one’s merit. He is a true believer in power of foresight, self-control and delayed gratification, and views these traits as at least par­tially innate. He deplores publicly traded companies, attributing to them a marshmallow-scarfing impatience driven by the need to produce short-term returns for footloose stockholders who will not hesitate to sell their shares if a company’s leadership has the gall to reinvest in superior capital instead of strip-mining the business to fund lavish dividends.

Instead, Koch thinks control over businesses should be retained by the patient marshmallow eschewers among us, whose capacity for delayed gratification will produce prosperity for all of us.

I’m no fan of Charles Koch, but I agree that his performance at the helm of Koch Industries demonstrated impressive discipline and self-control, and that his enormous economic and political power stems in large part from his ability to resist temptation and reinvest patient money in patient technologies.

But Koch’s foresight is extremely selective. Much of Koch’s fossil-fuel for­tune has been spent on funding climate denial and inaction. Koch claims that he sincerely believes that the climate emergency isn’t real or urgent, which is awfully convenient, given the centrality of fossil fuels to Koch’s power and wealth.

The rigor Koch applies to evaluating the technical propositions of new, efficient coal extraction and refining processes disappears when it comes to climate science. If Koch held coal-tech to the same evidentiary standard that he applies to the climate, he never would have bought a single piece of gear.

In other words, Koch’s patience, rationality, and capacity for delayed gratification are imperfect, which is unsurprising, because Koch is a human, and we are all imperfect. He is capable of rationalizing his way into irrational decisions in just the same way as the CEOs of public companies that he sneers at.

In reinvesting his father’s company’s earnings Koch passed one marshmallow test, and it made him a very wealthy man. But in choosing not to believe climate science and instead risking the end of a habitable Earth and the human race he belongs to, he failed a much more important marshmallow test.

This is the problem with marshmallow long­termism, the self-serving belief that you are the kind of Slan who can see – and plan for – the future that others either can’t see, or won’t ensure the necessary self-discipline to arrive at in good working condition. If you understand your self-control as a reflection of your innate superiority and fitness to rule, then you will miss it when you commit the same marshmallow-consuming sins you deplore in the little people.

When you observe that poverty and crime correlate closely with membership in racial mi­norities and being born into a poor place, you can choose to believe that the misery of the people is the result of their inherited poor neuroanatomy. You can dig out your calipers and find something to measure, declare whatever minor variation you find to be the seat of a heretofore unsuspected self-control organ that one either has or lacks.

Or you can do the rational thing: Take a long, hard look at the people on top and their self-control track record. If you do that, you’ll find the ranks of the rich and powerful stuffed with spectacular examples of mercurial bad judgment. It’s not just the little stuff, the cheating and the lying – it’s the big stuff, like driving civilization over the climate cliff, or hoarding so much wealth and power that they end up spending an ever-larger fraction of it on preventative measures and guard-labor to keep the rest of us from building guillotines on their lawns.

Self-control is a virtue, one that we could all stand to cultivate. The difference between the rich and the poor isn’t who has self-control. It comes down to whether your life has such thin margins that single lapse kicks off an avalanche of devastat­ing consequences, or whether you have the kind of cushions that allow you to recover from your slips.

We would also all benefit from those cushions, but not too many of them. The kind of wealth and power that insulates you from all your lapses is the kind of wealth and power that lets a few billionaires procure decades of climate inaction that dooms millions – or possibly billions – of us to grisly deaths amid rising seas, heat domes, zoonotic plagues and wildfires.

You know, the kind of thing that someone whose whole thing was, “I am prepared to live a little worse in the present in order to secure a better future” should be paying attention to.

All opinions expressed by commentators are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus.

This article and more like it in the September 2024 issue of Locus.

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