What is a civilization?

This is a quick post just to share something I found interesting. You know, my ears perk up anytime I hear someone say, “the most important _______ that I heard in my whole life was…”. So a few posts ago, that was Nassim Taleb saying the most important advice he ever received was to get a profession that was “scalable”, where your income did not directly depend on how many hours you work.

I’m presently working my way through The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous (and with a foreward by Nassim Taleb, actually). This book makes one of the best cases against a government fiat money that I’ve ever read, actually. But in a chapter that is about time preference, he says that the most important economics experiment ever performed was the marshmallow experiment.

…in the late 1960s. Psychologist Walter Mischel would leave children in a room with a piece of marshmallow or a cookie, and tell the kids they were free to have it if they wanted, but that he will come back in 15 minutes, and if the children had not eaten the candy, he would offer them a second piece as a reward. In other words, the children had the choice between the immediate gratification of a piece of candy, or delaying gratification and receiving two pieces of candy…. Mischel followed up with the children decades later and found significant correlation between having a low time preference as measured with the marshmallow test and good academic achievement, high SAT score, low body mass index, and lack of addiction to drugs.

That’s time preference - instead of living for the moment, we’re making a sort of immediate sacrifice to invest for even better returns in the future. Ammous goes on to talk about how, while academic economics is plenty concerned about trade-offs we make in our transactions with other people, the most important and most common trade-offs in our lives are the trades we make with ourselves. We will get a job immediately, or go to college? Will we eat in and save that money or just order Doordash? Will we study a little bit every day or cram just before the exam?

Indeed, it has often been a thought recently that one downside of a media-infested, frequent-elections democracy, is that it encourages our leaders to act for their immediate benefit instead of planning for the future. Let’s fill the New York City subway system with weapon detectors and soldiers because that will get us immediate positive headlines right now, even if they actually accomplish almost nothing (like the press ever follows up to check on anything). Or we could just go after the 1,000 or so people known to police to be causing all the problems, which would actually work, but that might take months or years and won’t produce the flashy media coverage we want.

Anyway, so what is a civilization? According to Ammous, a society in which factors have combined (including stable money) to give people a long enough time preference that they can spend much of their time making the world better for their children.

A society in which individuals bequeath their children more than what they received from their parents is a civilized society: it is a place where life is improving, and people live with a purpose of making the next generation’s lives better…. The security of their basic needs assured, and the dangers of the environment averted, people turn their attention toward more profound aspects of life than material well-being and the drudgery of work. They cultivate families and social ties; undertake cultural, artistic, and literary projects; and seek to offer lasting contributions to their community and the world. Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their basic needs are met and most pressing dangers averted.

That is all.