My recent article on Time Preference in Iraqi Culture has drawn many comments. I respond below in eclectic categories.
On Credentials
By training and profession, I am a chemical engineer. What audacity I have to make pronouncements regarding culture, sociology, development economics, and political economy! Logic provides us a simple solution, though. Attack the arguments and the facts, not the man.
For those who care to know, I have read a few books on these matters, and my job has required me to travel to foreign countries and stay for short visits (1–6 months), which has given me a bit of practical education. I have always had an interest in languages and cultures, and speak and read a little Japanese, Spanish, French, and Arabic, and I'm fluent in Esperanto. This latter fact may disarm those critics who might think of me as "ethnocentric." On the contrary, I'm a cosmopolitan, readily accepting the good in other cultures.
Test Cricket
By lunchtime in Melbourne on the day the original article appeared, my mailbox was bulging with exhortations on the virtues of Test Cricket. Some noted that the performance of Test Cricket is demonstrative of low time-preference activity. Since it is a leisure activity, I cannot agree. Nonetheless, it is a sport that neither Americans, nor, as I found out, Iraqis, have much use for. Bully for many of those in the former British Empire – it's just not my cup of tea.
Southerners
I mentioned in my piece that I am culturally Southern, and that those with whom I shared and compared my experiences in Iraq were also Southern. Some have read into this disclosure an agenda of sorts. This is not the case. I merely recorded it so that readers would have a clearer understanding of my experience and any "cultural filters" attendant to my account.
I was told by some emailers that high time-preference behavior can be found in the South. This is certainly the case. Indeed, some of the highest time-preference behavior in the US can be found among the lowest stratum of West Virginian society. (Some may insist that West Virginia be counted on the Union side, but this is a cultural matter, not a political one.) However, the time preferences of Southerners at large is not appreciably different from Northerners. And, no, just because you speak faster does not mean you're smarter. Shallow waters and all that.
Time Preferences in the United Arab Emirates
Many correspondents wrote to confirm my observations of Arab culture and the Third World, generally. One writer provided quite a bit of detail on the UAE. He wishes to remain anonymous, but has allowed me to quote him. His unedited words:
Given our PC world you have shown a good deal of courage going public with this stuff. I am an Australian working in the ME, and have taught in the area for some years. The high time-preference thing is manifested in my experience here in the following ways:
- The moronic and homicidal driving, which amazes and angers me still after several years of enduring it.
- The appalling littering, which occurs openly and without shame.
- Slaughtering animals at home and throwing the carcasses in the street bin, with the obvious health and odour problems.
- The students (aged roughly 18–23) not showing up at pre-arranged times, including times of their choosing.
- Rude, unruly behaviour in class (not by everyone, of course) which often takes the form of over-talking the teacher.
- The difficulty of getting students to complete individual assignments and homework that do not count for grades.
- The walking speed of the students around the campus (a snail would show more vigour)
- Shocking levels of obesity, and these are young adults.
- Young children running amok in public (in shopping centres, etc.) in the presence of their parents who condone and ignore it.
- The awful neglect of feral animals, including some dogs, but mainly diseased and starving cats which are everywhere in the city that I live in. My wife and I find this most distressing, and unforgivable in a country that is far from poor.
- The general impression of irrationality that pervades every aspect of life from shopping, to paying bills, to registering your car, to getting repairs done. Try directing a deliveryman in a city where the concept of an address has not taken off, and there are no street directories. What do you do? You talk him in on a mobile phone of course, or you go with him in the truck.
My impression is (I can’t prove it) that high time-preference in general is most prevalent among peoples that have not created a high-level of civilization. It is partly cultural but mainly a function of intelligence (peoples that have not created a high-level of culture on their own tend not to be very intelligent). This is supported by the fact that the brighter members of any population show less of it, and the unintelligent show more of it, including in Western countries. The highest time-preference people are stone-age people, like the Australian aborigines, to whom no group on earth can hold a candle when it comes to high time-preference behaviour.
For all their faults the students (and people) I deal with can be quite likeable. They appear to have a genuine regard for Westerners, which regrettably is being squandered by the hideous catastrophe in Iraq.
As a closing to observations in the non-war-torn Middle East, I offer another anecdote. This one I had while driving in downtown Kuwait City. A mother allowed her child to be without car seat or seatbelt in the front seat as they cruised at 50 km/h. The child decided to stand, and then the mother opened the sunroof to allow her child to enjoy the wind in his hair. I snapped a picture mostly for the comedic value – the car was a Volvo.
Why High Time Preferences in the UAE?
However, the high time-preference behaviors in Kuwait and the UAE may also have culturally exogenous roots. In Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE, massive welfare states for nationals are funded from a portion of the proceeds of the state-owned petroleum companies.
In Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, the nationals get free healthcare for life, free education all the way through the university level, an outright grant to male nationals upon first marriage to another national, a land grant for a house, and either a generous interest-free loan with which to build the house, or another outright grant.
The nationals of these countries that do find work almost always find it in a government institution like the military, the police, or a civil government outfit. They like government service because it pays well, they are not required to do much actual work, and there is no competition either with their labor or its products. Private enterprise employs very few of them (why would it when the private sector can get an Indian who will work twice as hard for a third of the cost?).
You hardly ever see a national doing physical work, except maybe the odd aging farmer who has not known anything else. The younger generation is disgustingly spoiled. One cringes at the thought of them inheriting their country.
My anonymous emailer adds:
I have yet to meet [an Emirati] student who does not have a maid from the subcontinent or Indonesia or the Philippines. Very often the family has an assortment of maids, cooks, drivers, or gardeners all working 6 and 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, for the princely sum of US$150 a month plus board, and a paid trip home every 2 years.
This paints a picture in contrast to Iraq. In Iraq, there was not and is not such an all-embracing welfare state as found in Kuwait, Qatar, or the UAE, it being intermediate between the welfare-statism of Europe and the US. Therefore, the attendant infantilization of Iraq's culture is much less pronounced. So, the conclusion that Iraqi time preferences will fall with increases in security, trade, and friendship is stronger.
Time Preferences in Trinidad, Fiji
High time-preference behaviors of a lesser magnitude are seen in Trinidad, which I have observed and mentioned in the first article. Mr. Vince Daliessio shares his corroborating view:
I worked on the Amoco LNG project in Trinidad in 1998 (my company dredged the shore approach of the pipeline to Guayaguayare, and laid the pull cable to the McDermott laybarge), and found that indeed there is often a high relative time preference among the Trinis. However, this varies considerably. East Indian Trinis are long reputed to be much more low time preference than Afro Trinis. But there is considerable variation within the two groups, and for every Lennox Prasad there is another East Indian whose time preferences are indistinguishable from his Afro co-workers. This means, it seems to me, that the differences are mostly cultural, and therefore are amenable to change. This is not to say that any individual needs to change, nor to take anything away from any individual in that society. Indeed, most of the Afro Trinis I worked with were highly motivated and very literate, many of them extremely hard workers and great good company aboard ship.
The other major relevant observation I made about time preference in Trinidad is that there are relatively few consequences for high time preference in a tropical country like Trinidad compared with say the northeastern US. In the former, no matter how little you save to provide for yourself, you are never really in danger of starving or freezing. There is government-provided clean water in all inhabited areas, and there is abundant food such as fish, wildfowl, and edible plants such that even abject poverty is no obstacle to living fairly well. Conversely, if you do not make some attempt at economic planning in, say, New York City, you will find yourself sleeping on a steam grate (if you are lucky) and eating out of dumpsters.
An account from Mr. Randy Palmer on Fijian time preferences reads:
I am an American who lived for 3 years in Fiji, islands in the South Pacific. I am an only parent, male, I am a widower. When I arrived it was quite a thing to them to see a man caring for 2 small children.
One day my 2 children were playing out back with some Fijian children and my boy, who was 4.5 years at the time, was throwing some rocks with about 4 other children younger than him present. I rushed over to him saying, "No, no, no! Don’t throw rocks someone is going to get hurt." Immediately the Fijian aunt of some of the other children started telling me. "No here in Fiji we let the children do what they want, they are so free." I was distracted and said, "But someone is going to get hurt." Just then one of the kids started crying and I turned around and sure enough, my son had hit them with a rock. I started for my son and the woman started saying, "Its ok, it was an accident, he didn’t mean to hit him with a rock."
I was dumbfounded…It was like there was no connection between the behavior and the result. I learned then that to many Fijians "Tomorrow is a long long way aways…" I learned to live with it and now we have been living in Mexico, for 8 years. They are much less like the Fijians but still less than like my culture, the US, in this respect.
A Fijian once told me that "Europeans (white people), are too concerned about the future and Fijians not enough."
I quote these at length to underscore the fact that time preferences are indeed higher in other locales, and this is not always due to "external" factors such as war and want.
More on Oral Hygiene
By way of explanation of Arab dental hygiene, George (last name withheld) writes:
As you know, in Moslem countries males and females do not kiss in public, and most of the times neither in private. Females are only sexual objects for guy to get their way with them, without thinking of pleasing them. In other words, in our culture, guys are being RATED by their female lovers on their hygiene. In their culture, women cannot talk back to guys. Actually, if you look back at our culture only about 30 years ago, you will remember that smoking was not a bad thing then, and lots of people reeked of smoke, and their mouth stunk to high heaven. It is only now that smokers are very mindful of chewing gum to cover up their stink.
I do not completely agree with George's assessment of the Arab attitude toward women, but it is indeed worthwhile to note that with the progress of wealth in the US, dental hygiene has improved. Not only was this a comedic point in the recent movie Austin Powers, but there has been an explosion of oral hygienic goods, from gum to mints to strips to whitening agents to brush-ups.
Thus, we can see in even a small area the operation of the process of civilization which Hoppe elucidated.
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Cultural criticism often draws charges of racism, ethnocentrism, and even materialism. On the charges of racism and ethnocentrism, one cannot do better than to quote from the Preface to Thomas Sowell's Migrations and Cultures:
History can be cruel to theories, as it has been cruel to peoples. Examples of both should be apparent in the chapters that follow. But history is what happened, not what we wish had happened, or what a theory says should have happened. History cannot be prettified in the interests of promoting "acceptance" or "mutual respect" among peoples and cultures. There is much in the history of every people that does not deserve respect. Whether with individuals or with groups, respect is something earned, not a door prize handed out to all. It cannot be prescribed by third parties, for what is to be respected depends on each individual's own values or the social values accepted by that individual – and "equal respect" is an internally contradictory evasion. If everything is to be respected equally, then the term respect has lost its meaning.
What Sowell writes, though, seems too generous. There are some values (such as material economic progress) which are universally recognized as good. If there are cultural values, such as high time preference, that prevent or retard the realization of that good, then such a value is rightly to be condemned, universally.
Relatedly, one correspondent recommended that I read The Silent Language by Edward T. Hall. While I have not read any of Hall's books, one thesis that I glean from reviews of his books on Amazon.com, interviews with Hall, and other commentary on the Internet can be summed up thusly: Time (and space) is perceived differently in different cultures. A reviewer notes that Hall documents in his books that Latin Americans and Arabs don't have cultural strictures against showing up late for meetings. My concern is confirmed by another reviewer on Amazon.com:
Hall tries to keep value judgments out of his comparisons, but fails at the task. Over and again he slips and lets us see his disregard for American culture. Americans are too conscious of time compared to more laid-back cultures. Americans are too strict in their concept of personal space. And so on. Whenever he slips and lets his opinions show, he invariably finds American culture lacking, no matter what it is being compared to.
Cultural relativism is bad enough, but a prejudice in favor of high time preferences is appalling.
Now, on to the charge of materialism. One correspondent wrote:
Greg Fisher from Sydney, Australia ‘ere! …I lived in Mexico for a year, on a Rotary Youth Exchange scholarship, in 1979. Yes, they are more laid back than “us” uptight, anglo workaholics howsomever their lifestyle includes a deeper and more spiritual side than our materialism will ever appreciate. They live, we work. Making Iraqis into capitalist drones smacks of a blinding cultural arrogance.
I reply that it is not I that demands material prosperity for Iraqis. It is they who clamor to have all of the comforts so common in the West. But, further, as Rothbard explained, and as codified in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the law of marginal utility informs us that greater material wealth allows people to have greater amounts of leisure to devote to spiritual and other "non-materialist" concerns. And so, he who favors greater spiritual devotion should support greater material abundance.
It is true that greater abundance does not necessarily lead to people consuming greater amounts of leisure. However, greater abundance is what makes it possible, and the history of the 20th century shows that most people do indeed opt for more leisure. Whether they spend it on worthy endeavors is another matter.
Say It Isn't So!
Randy Holcombe speaks with the voice of many, when he admits a common assumption in personal email correspondence:
In economics, we like to assume that underneath, everybody is the same, and their different behaviors are a result of different constraints they face. This may or may not be true. But as an economist, my inclination is to look at the constraints Iraqis face that are different from those faced by people in developed nations.
Part of the culture in which I was raised, and struggled to reject, was this assumption of sameness. If the entire legacy of Thomas Sowell's scholarship on culture could be summed up in a few words, they might be: Culture matters with regard to material progress, and it is far more persistent through time and space than we are accustomed to thinking.
My own quest to improve my life has been to learn from foreign cultures what I can. Some elements of virtually every culture are worthy of praise and emulation, while other elements are worthy of disdain.
Why Are Some Countries Poor?
I was the recipient of many suggestions regarding the reasons for poverty in the Third World. One reader recommended the book I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations by Lynn and Vanhanen. Another suggests The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by sociologist Max Weber. Yet another merely stated: "The third world is poor because the population is underpaid."
I cannot proceed without swatting down the fallacy in that last comment. If the economy were free, then workers would tend to get their "discounted marginal value product" – get paid what they’re worth, given the supply for their type of labor and the supply and demand for what their labor produces. If a third world worker is not paid what he is worth, then the culprit is taxes, trade restrictions, or other interventions.
The field of development economics is large, and I cannot here do justice to the many contributors, both good and bad, so I will not try. Instead, I will redirect attention to the main thrust of the original article: time preference.
What Can Be Done?
Low time preference is both a prerequisite to and an outcome of economic progress.
One correspondent wondered whether Iraq can be transformed into a democracy. I don't think democracy is necessarily related to economic development. Further, I think most Iraqis are willing to forgo some degree of economic progress and security for freedom from what they perceive to be hegemonic control of their country – in this way, democracy as the US government envisions or attempts to sculpt in Iraq is actually a drag on economic progress.
I remain committed to the solutions I advanced in my original article on this topic. To help Iraqis achieve economic progress, security, and liberty, we should:
- Trade with Iraqis
- Befriend Iraqis
Simple, yet powerful. And again, due to the lack of an all-embracing welfare state in Iraq, the prospects for economic development there are better than those of its neighbors, such as Kuwait.
November 24, 2004
