FRUITFUL PATIENCE

Patience

What is patience? Humans and other animals often make decisions that trade off present and future benefits. Should a monkey eat an unripe fruit or wait for it to ripen? Should I purchase the iPhone at its debut or wait for the price to drop in a few months? In these dilemmas, large gains often require long waits, so decision makers must choose between a smaller, sooner reward and a larger, late...

Fruitful insights

leeches and earthworms. It is not yet clear just how many of these are new discoveries, though the number is in the hundreds, but it is estimated that anywhere from one to nine million ocean species remain to be found, making this haul just the tip of the iceberg. The divers also placed little structures they refer to as doll's houses, but more formally known as Autonomous Reef Monitoring Syste...

Patience and prosperity

This paper introduces wealth-dependent time preference into a simple model of endogenous growth. The model generates adjustment dynamics in line with the historical facts on savings and economic growth in Europe from the High Middle Ages to today. Along a virtuous cycle of development more wealth leads to more patience, which leads to more savings and even higher wealth. Savings rates and incom...

Fruitful design: the CDM

As the famous Rolling Stone’s song goes: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you might find, you get what you need”. What we want, and what we need are sometimes quite different things. In some ways, this may epitomize the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a market based mechanism that creates a way for developed countries and companies to offset...

A fruitful and gratifying collaboration.