When the Experimenter Fails the Marshmallow Test
How a generation's time preference was sabotaged
The venture capitalist and anticharismatic preacher Kevin O’Leary recently succeeded in reigniting the perennial vitriol of generational hate discourse with his observation that it really bothers him when he sees zoomers who only make $70,000 a year spending $28 on lunch when they could be brown-bagging it and putting the savings into an index fund.
I’m going to have a little rant, here, so I’ll start by emphasizing: Not All Boomers. Look, my mother is a boomer, and I love her dearly, in large part because she represents the opposite of so many boomer stereotypes. Many of you reading this are boomers; I know this because you’re in the comments, writing some of the best comments, you can ask anyone, the very best comments, everyone says it, it’s true. I know full well that much of what follows doesn’t apply to you, because you’re the good ones, the exceptional ones, the few, the proud So, please, do not take any of this personally.
With that said.
The shouting match broke down along the expected lines. Boomers – including spiritual boomers – loudly agreed with O’Leary’s remarks. If you only spend $2 a day on lunch, they insisted, the resulting $26 a day that you save adds up to $9490 a year; after 5 years, you’ve got the down payment for a $250,000 house. Checkmate, you financially illiterate layabouts!
Zoomers, millennials, and Gen-X replied that $250,000 will get you a leaky shack in rural Arkansas with black mold in the unfinished basement; that by the time you save up the money for the down-payment, that shack will be going for $500,000; that recent immigrants receive government assistance to get onto the property ladder (along with preferential employment) and so do not have to spend years of their lives saving up at all. Disaffected youth (and these days, that is just ‘the youth’) generally heaped scorn on the idea that it’s even possible to save in this economy, or that there’s anything worth saving. “If you live on instant noodles and margarine sandwiches for twenty years, you too, my son, can one day afford a van down by the river.”
I can see both sides of this. I tend to live frugally myself, not so much because I consider it virtuous but out of simple necessity. Throughout my 20s and 30s I was a career student living paycheck-to-paycheck, as a result of which I became very accustomed to cooking my meals and buying only what’s necessary. I’ve never once used DoorDash or Uber Eats. I buy my clothing at thrift stores, only purchase a new laptop once every decade or so, and have somehow managed to avoid racking up much in the way of debt ... and by ‘somehow’ I mean that I’ve never owned a house or a car, partly because I changed continents too regularly to make such big-ticket purchases practical or necessary, but mostly because I couldn’t afford them. Even finishing my doctorate did not really bring anything you could call prosperity in its wake: my first position was for the princely some of just over USD30,000 per year. By the time I reached the median national income in my late 30s, I’d gotten so accustomed to frugal living that money started piling up in my account just because I had no idea what to do with it, and little inclination to spend it because I was honestly just happy to not have to worry about budgeting to make rent. That turned out to be very helpful when DEI came for my career track; I lived on those savings for a couple of years after.
A rainy day fund which has long since been spent down, of course. These days, my sole source of income is derived from the words that I share with you here, which I provide for all, free of charge. Ahem. Shakes cup.
So, yes, it is obviously possible to save some money up by living under one’s means.
Assuming that one is actually making money that is.
Which zoomers mostly aren’t.
Zoomers fly into a rage when they’re told to tighten their belts so that they can save for the future., because zoomers do not think that they have a future.
They are not wrong to think this way.
Planning for the future relies on the ability to defer gratification, to prioritize the greater potential reward over the smaller present reward. To a very large degree this is the basis of civilization, which as the old saying goes thrives when old men plants trees whose shade they will never enjoy. Old men do not plant metaphorical trees anymore; they cut them down for quick cash to pay for casino cruises. The baby boom generation took out tens of trillions of dollars in debt in their descendants’ names to pay for social welfare programs that only baby boomers will enjoy.
Boomers will often point out that the younger generations today are lazy spendthrifts, and there is actually a lot of truth to that. Zoomers think nothing of calling in sick to work for the third time in one week so they can bedrot in front of Netflix with their pad thai takeout and mango-cherry vape juice. This moral failing, boomers despair, is why their grandchildren are destined for downward mobility, and why they don’t dare hand over the reins of society to them.
There was a famous Stanford experiment called the Marshmallow Test which measured time preference in young children. A child would be left in a room with a single marshmallow on the table. They were of course free to eat the marshmallow, the experimenter would tell them, but if they didn’t, then later on they would get a second marshmallow. Children with high time preference – meaning that they strongly prefer the immediate reward to the hypothetical future reward – would cram the marshmallow into their candy-holes without a second thought. Children with low time preference – meaning that they value the future at a similar or even higher level to the present – would patiently wait, and be rewarded with a second marshmallow. These children were then followed, and it was demonstrated that the children with low time preference demonstrated better life outcomes: they maintained higher grades, were less likely to fall into debt, were less likely to develop drug addictions, were less likely to get pregnant before marriage, were less likely to get fat, and so on. All of which makes sense. The capacity to endure present pain – by studying, dieting, working out, what have you – in order to obtain a better future outcome is obviously going to be linked to better outcomes.
How would a smart kid react if the experimenter failed the marshmallow test?
For instance, say the experimenter simply lied. There was no second marshmallow; the child waited for nothing. Or, even worse, the first marshmallow was snatched away, and replaced with two marshmallows, each one half the size of the original? Or a third the size? Here are your two marshmallows, sucker, joke’s on you. What would the results be if, after this experience, the children were tested a second time? I don’t know if such an experiment has ever been conducted, but the outcome is not hard to guess. Every single one of the children, whether they’d passed the marshmallow test the first time or not, would scarf down the marshmallow the moment it was in front of them.
The capacity for low time preference may be largely innate, but whether it expresses or not is entirely a function of social trust. In order to defer gratification for a greater future reward, one must believe that there is a reasonably high chance of that reward manifesting. The less likely the future reward becomes, the more steeply a rational actor will discount the future.
I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.
But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that – so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted – things would generally get better. Technology would advance. Working conditions would get safer. The special effects in movies would become more convincing. Houses would get larger. Cars would get nicer. Air conditioning would get quieter. The environment would get cleaner. Society would become more just. The world would become freer and safer for democracy. And so on and so forth. Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.
For the zoomer – and the millennial, and generation X – this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).
If you’re a young person, the only thing you’ve ever known is decline. You’ve seen society get digested by the attention economy, human interactions digitized into shares, views, and likes. You’ve seen the war of Discourse poison relations between the sexes to a degree never known before in history. You’ve seen dating apps replace romance with swipes and monogamy with Tindergamy. You’ve seen third spaces disappear. You’ve seen culture stagnate. You’ve seen music, movies, television shows, video games, and books be converted into hamfisted, poorly written, badly composed, terribly edited agitslop. You’ve seen the Internet get enshittified by adware, malware, spyware, engagement bait, and the subscription-model SaaS scam economy. You’ve seen food get more expensive, even as the quality of the ingredients declines, and the portion sizes decrease. You’ve seen a third of your income get stolen by inflation in a few year’s time. You’ve seen the basic elements of a human life – a house, a spouse, children – recede before you like a mirage in the desert.
I’d like to believe that this is all temporary, that things can be turned around, but if you tell me this hope is nothing more than cope it is very difficult for me to argue otherwise. Maybe things will finally improve and maybe they won’t; the point is that, for the young who have only ever known civilizational rot, it is entirely rational for them to lay down and let it rot.
Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.
Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that.
That is why zoomers don’t care about ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ or ‘education’ or ‘savings’. They know there’s no such thing as institutional loyalty, that they’ll be cut loose the moment their job can be automated or outsourced to cheap Indian labour, and so why would they be loyal to their employers? Why would they do any more than the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired? Especially under the identitarian spoils system of DEI that makes a point of rewarding someone else for your hard work.
Zoomers have no faith that the future will be better and every reason to believe that it will be much worse, and so they have every reason to prize the small, present pleasure over some future prize that experience has taught them lives only in their broken dreams. What’s the point in saving for a house if you’ll never even be able to afford a hovel in an abandoned toxic-waste dump small town where the major local industries revolve around the fentanyl trade? You might as well just splurge on that $28 lunch, which you can enjoy now, and which you won’t be able to enjoy in a few years, when you’re making the same amount of money, but that lunch costs $48, is prepared with worse ingredients, is provided in smaller portions, and is served in grottier surroundings by less attractive waitresses who now expect a 40% tip.
To be clear, I’m not saying this is a good thing. This generational demoralization is a great tragedy. Zoomers have been spiritually sabotaged, and many of them will never recover. Once social trust is broken it is incredibly hard to rebuild.
This is not entirely the boomers’ fault. They’ve been the primary beneficiaries of the vampire economy, and they are by far its strongest defenders, but they weren’t the ones who set the system up. That would be the ‘greatest generation’, who were the ones that built out the welfare state, passed the Civil Rights Act, dismantled long-standing protections against third-world immigration, and first started letting the money printer rip. Boomers have profited from a kind of generational Cantillon effect: they were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together.
Blame is beside the point. On its own it isn’t going to solve anything. The only way to fix this is for things to start improving for young people again, and not in the sense of getting cheaper smartphones or whatever. We are talking about very basic, mammalian necessities: food, shelter, mating. It doesn’t matter if technological trinkets are slightly more affordable than they were last year when the foundational elements of Maslow’s Hierarchy are either chewing giant holes through shrinking budgets or simply priced out of any practical reach. Sneers about $28 lunches come off as particularly tone-deaf when groceries have exploded in price to such a degree that it’s barely cheaper to eat in than it is to eat out1. Not to mention that restaurants everywhere are struggling because people don’t have the money to eat out.
I don’t know how to solve this. Unless there’s a world-historical economic boom thanks to AI – which there’s no sign of yet, and furthermore it would need to be one whose benefits are not concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs – there’s probably no way to solve it without pain. The only question is how that pain will be distributed. Experience suggests that boomers are unlikely to volunteer to take the hit. If we were sane we’d dismantle the social security system immediately, and start putting in place systems to transfer opportunity, wealth, and power to native-born child-bearing demographics immediately. This is improbable. The most likely outcome is that, over the next decade or two, the boomers will spend down the last of the West’s national wealth on heroic end-of-life health care, and leave behind a broken mess of insolvency, shattered institutions, lost cultural knowledge, and tribal warfare. None of which will be a problem for the boomers. Après moi, le déluge. It will be up to everyone else to piece together something resembling a functioning society amidst the ashes and ruins. By that point, millennials will be in their 50s and 60s; most of their lives will be behind them. Zoomers will be hitting middle age. Perhaps you can see why everyone under 50 is so dejected, and prefers treating themselves with the small pleasures they can still afford rather than dwelling upon the long decline that awaits?
Or, instead of berating the youth for their moral failings while society crumbles, you might try throwing them that marshmallow and seeing what happens.
Thanks for taking the time to read my little diatribe. A few years ago I got into it with a family member – well, an aunt’s boyfriend, but we like him, he’s a good guy, so he’s family now – who’d started complaining to me about how he couldn’t find good help these days because the kids were all lazy. When I framed it like this it took him aback, and when I saw him a couple of years later he made a point of telling me that he’d never looked at it that way, and it had really made him see things differently. Which was surprising to me, because I thought it was rather obvious. Fish, water, I suppose. Anyhow, at the very least I hope you found this entertaining.
As always, many thanks to my supporters. It’s rough out there and money’s tight, believe me I get it, and that makes your support all the more meaningful.
Have you seen the price of beef lately? Beef used to be a staple for me; now I treat myself to that once a month or so, because I can’t justify $25 for an 8-ounce steak. Remember the World Economic Forum video in which they sneered that ‘meat would be an occasional treat’? Yeah, about that.
Many jobs today don't pay more than $30 per hour: i was making that over 25 years ago. I'm not a Boomer, I'm a pre-boomer, older than rocks.
I had two trades, was skilled mechanically and was NEVER out of a job and always had the opportunity to find one, though it might take a month or two whenever I job-hopped or relocated, which was f frequent. I had at least 15 different jobs, the majority with great wages and benefits.
It never occurred to me how fortunate Ii was. I came of age in the '50's and the immediate post war (WW2) years were the best times to live in that century, at least in English speaking North America. If I were a Zoomer today I'd seriously consider a life of crime., preferably ripping of the oligarchs and mega-rich in some fashion.
Simple psychological explanation: recency bias. For boomers, working and saving up worked. That's their most recent memory: I worked, saved, and now I'm rich. They fail to see all the money printing that helped them and kicked the cost down the road to be paid by their children. They couldn't fail. For Xers and down, it's the opposite. The most recent memory is: no matter what we do we're in debt and constantly trying to catch up. It's neither genetics nor 'character' but simple psychology.