The Angel of 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...

The Angel wins

The angel-devil game is played on an infinite two-dimensional “chessboard” Z. The squares of the board are all white at the beginning. The players called angel and devil take turns in their steps. When it is the devil’s turn, he can turn a square black. The angel always stays on a white square, and when it is her turn she can fly at a distance of at most J steps (each of which can be horizontal...

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...

The Guardian Angel of CPR

Patience and The Wealth of Nations∗

According to standard dynamic choice theories, patience is a key driving factor behind the accumulation of the proximate determinants of economic development. Using a novel representative data set on time preferences from 80,000 individuals in 76 countries, we investigate the empirical relevance of this hypothesis in the context of a development accounting framework. We find a significant reduc...