The Hindu Business Line : Impatience beyond nail biting

PATIENCE is a virtue that Thiruvalluvar praised more than two thousand years ago as "a sure way to overcome those who through pride commit excesses." But we know that patience is out of fashion. Party bigwigs are impatient to grab plum posts, as if in competition with our cricketers who itch to get back to the pavilion.

Normally, we can gauge impatient behaviour by looking at how fidgety someone is: biting nails, craning the neck, and generally restless, to make others too impatient. There are other ways to measure impatience, as in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, titled "Job Search and Impatience," by economists Stefano DellaVigna and M. Daniele Paserman.

"Impatience has two contrasting effects on job search," explain the authors. First, "more impatient individuals assign a lower value to the future benefits of search, and therefore exert less effort," and this leads to a long unemployment spell. And second, higher impatience lowers the reservation wage and shortens the unemployment spell, because "once a wage offer is received, more impatient individuals prefer to accept what they already have at hand rather than to wait an additional period for a better offer."

So, impatience has its pluses too, but let me fast forward from the "abstract" to the "measures of impatience" midway in the paper.

"Attempts to measure rates of time preference have so far been conducted exclusively in laboratory experiments," observe the authors. "Yet individuals pursue many activities that indirectly reveal a preference for early gratification." While patient people pursue activities with "immediate costs and delayed benefits," the impatient ones look at the opposite, that is, "immediate rewards and delayed costs."

An example given is of how a respondent may be "friendly and interested; cooperative and not interested; impatient and restless; or hostile," at the end of an interview. The impatient one may, for instance, detest answering a given questionnaire, "even though at some previous time he or she had agreed to be interviewed (perhaps attracted by the monetary compensation or by the warm glow that comes from cooperating with a scientific enterprise)." More down to earth, you can see such behaviour in an unemployed worker too; he or she may plan to fill in forms and job applications, but then postpone such activities because of aversion to the immediate costs, state the authors. If they have "a high opportunity value of time," it could well be a delusion.

Having a bank account is another visible measure. "More patient individuals delay consumption and accumulate more wealth," while an impatient worker may be ready to suffer "an exorbitant transaction fee" for immediate spending over the weekend rather than wait to withdraw from the bank on Monday.

"Use of contraceptives" is yet another measure. How? "More patient individuals use contraceptives consistently, and more so when involved in casual relationships," say the authors, citing data culled. "We classify individuals who use contraceptives as patient, and individuals who do not use them and are not married as impatient. We assign a missing value to married individuals who did not use any birth control, since we cannot know whether these individuals were planning to have a child." See where economics can delve in.

Life insurance coverage is also a giveaway sign, according to the authors. Impatient people prefer jobs with a higher wage but no insurance coverage.

Similarly, there is a high correlation between health habits such as smoking and drinking ("pleasurable at the time of consumption but detrimental to health afterwards") vis-à-vis patience. "Relatively patient individuals are more likely to engage in healthy behaviour and to invest in human capital accumulation, as both activities can be regarded as involving a trade-off between present and future payoffs."

The rest become patients, perhaps.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in