The Marshmallow, Work Ethic and the Debt

I was struck by an excellent editorial published in the Wall Street Journal.

Brooks says, essentially, that Barack Obama’s budget plan is irresponsible once more. He indefinitely postpones (this goes without saying) the return to a policy of reducing public debt in a credible manner. He continues to provide benefits that are financed by borrowing — a broken middle class dependent on bailouts that it does not want to pay for it with taxes. He maintains the myth, clearly also popular elsewhere, that raising taxes on the rich will sufficiently solve all the problems.

But above all, Brooks mentions an extraordinary experiment conducted in 1972 by psychologist Walter Mischel of Stanford University. The experiment is apparently well known. But I only learned about it today: he brought young children around a table in a room. On the table: a bag of marshmallows. He explained, ‘If you are willing to wait 15 minutes, you can eat two marshmallows. If you do not have this courage to wait for two marshmallows, you can have only one.’

Of course most children chose to eat one marshmallow immediately.

The most interesting part is yet to come! Mischel then followed these children up to their adult lives. Those who, when they were young, had the courage and willingness to postpone their satisfaction were more professionally and socially successful. Drugs, unemployment and failure have had the strongest impact on those who could not resist their immediate urge.

The social democracy of Obama, in which one can recognize so much that is French, consists of telling voters: let’s not pay immediately, let’s continue to stuff ourselves. The 40 percent boom in public debt since 2008? ‘It was necessary to avoid [economic] depression.’ Another deficit that is 8 percent of GDP this year? ‘We must continue to boost demand.’ America’s loss of a AAA rating? ‘A penalty which was not deserved.’

Preaching austerity today in the United States has become too politically dangerous. Polls show that Republicans are seeing their popularity decline. Their more or less orthodox tax message passes for masochism (more on this later). Obama is trying to convince his countrymen that it is important not to cut public spending. He wishes instead to tax more millionaires. His definition of a millionaire? ‘Someone who earns more than $250,000 a year.’

The marshmallow experiment is actually an illustration of the same lesson as that of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The Social Democratic grasshopper is kind. The ant is a nasty capitalist. The grasshopper wants equality and fairness. The ant works and does not redistribute the wealth it has created. The grasshopper sings today without thinking about tomorrow, as the Greeks have done for a long time, better than all the other peoples of advanced democratic countries. Angela Merkel is a horrible ant who refuses to pay out the money she has earned through her hard work and sacrifice to help the grasshoppers of southern Europe. I am oversimplifying, I am embellishing, but you get the picture.

To be honest, the Republicans are not real ants. Firstly, because their contenders for the White House refused to say where and how they will cut public spending. Then, because they continue to say we need lower taxes. The Republicans claim to think about disenchanted tomorrows, but they too are fundamentally hiding their true face, with the exception of a few who are not candidates for the White House, such as Paul Ryan. He dares to openly say how one could permanently reduce the exploding public spending: in the domain of healthcare and retirement pensions. His plan is debatable, but it has the merit to exist.

Lastly: it must be well understood that the Democrats and European Social Democrats do not wish to address the root of all evil. It is those who are the ‘conservatives.’ They want to preserve the welfare state by over-taxing ‘the rich.’ These people have often (perhaps not always) worked hard to become rich. But it makes no difference; in the name of fairness, we must punish them to give to those who preferred to sing and dance.

The deception is to believe that only the levy imposed on ‘the self-made men and the well-off’ will be enough to save the welfare state and restore equality. Yet in fact it is the entire middle class that must be made to pay more. Alas, there are not enough ants to feed marshmallows to all of the grasshoppers.