In Australia at the federal level of government, we have some of the shortest election cycles in the world: often barely three years. This mitigates against even medium-term planning. A new government takes a year to learn the ropes of office, another year to govern before preparing for re-election in the third. And even if a government survives that long, the odds are its leader won’t.

As a government minister, why forward plan and propose large national projects which might take more than a decade to complete if you are not in office to take the credit for them?

Two constitutional referenda to expand election cycles to four years failed, as have proposals for fixed-term elections. Why? Is the public justifiably cynical that politicians want to extend their time in office? Or is synchronising elections for the House of Representatives with half the Senate simply too difficult because it would push Senate terms out to eight years?

The problem is a symptom of a more general social malaise: the desire for instant gratification. We want governments to solve our problems immediately and, if they don’t, replace them or their leader with someone who will (but inevitably cannot). No political party is honest enough to tell the electorate that structural change takes time.

It is similar in the housing market. Purchasers seem increasingly averse to expanding the size of their dwellings over time or waiting until the size of their family increases. They want it all and they want it now: specifically McMansions. Gone are the days when a third of the equity for a house had to be saved before a bank would consider loaning a purchaser the difference. Unsurprisingly, private debt, which is acutely sensitive to shifts in interest rates, has skyrocketed. Patience, on the other hand, is now the rarest of commodities.

The problem has seeped into almost every corner of our lives.

We want to access music as soon as it is released from a streaming service (Spotify, Apple Music) without having to purchase a physical copy of it (including album designs and artwork) or pay an additional subscription fee. Consequently, recording artists now earn a pittance in royalties and must tour relentlessly to break even, let alone profit from their creativity.

Increasingly, we are watching movies the same way (Netflix, Apple TV+, etc), although some directors (David Lynch) and movie theatres are fighting a rearguard action to maintain initial exclusivity before “home cinema” or watching films on a phone or tablet becomes the default viewing platform for their art form.

We can visit art galleries such as the Louvre virtually and at any time, without leaving our lounge chair or ever gazing at the physical objects as they were intended to be seen by the artists and sculptors.

Digitisation has clearly had a significant and irreversible impact on how culture is “consumed” in the modern age, but it is by no means the only culprit. The desire for instant gratification has had a revolutionary impact on our lives over the last three decades.

It is not just that information and news is now sourced from unconventional sources via social media. In fact, this can be invaluable when mainstream media in the West refuse to cover critical events, such as Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, in an honest and professional way.

However, when complex events are reduced to doom scrolling and screenshots, the “tyranny of concision” ensures that context and the historical background of events are the first victims to vaporise. Whatever news and analysis is quickly chunked on X, Facebook, Tiktok or Instagram must then compete with the “cult of celebrity” for an individual’s attenuated attention span.

If they do buy books in the form of conventional monographs, people can do so almost instantaneously via ebooks (Kindle), as audiobooks if they don’t want to actually read them (Audible), or get them delivered home within 24 hours (Amazon).

But we don’t read the same kind of books anymore. As a discouraged Noam Chomsky told me 25 years ago, his Q&A publications outsell his long-form books by about 7:1. Publishers are reckoning with the realisation that young readers do not have the patience to work through a 100,000-word analysis of what Israel was doing to Gaza before 7 October, 2023: a quick 300-word Q&A will have to do. Or perhaps they will wait until “Gaza the video game” arrives, when they can assume the role of an heroic IDF soldier hunting down Hamas terrorists, and thus blur the lines between reality and simulation.

Many people no longer have the patience to communicate in conventional cursive form in snail mail or email, which was initially known as a punctuation-free space. They prefer incomprehensible abbreviations and shorthand on messaging platforms where nuance and the beauty of language have no role to play.

It is in the world economy, however, where instant gratification has had its most dramatic impact, systemically eroding the stability of global finance.

The 2008 global financial crisis was largely caused by the reckless lending practices of private investment banks in the US and Europe, selling sub-prime mortgages to consumers who wanted instant, rather than delayed, gratification, even at the risk of defaulting.

Speculation on the financial casino for instant super-profits rather than prudent, long-term investment in productive industries (the real economy) also took over the world’s financial system. By the time the first signs of a crisis were noticed in late 2007, the old battle between investment banking fed by high-risk speculation and heavily-leveraged loans, and establishment or probity banking, had been decisively won by the former.

Few had the patience of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who made a loss for 11 consecutive years before turning a profit. Investors were encouraged to be speculators and gamblers, to demand immediate, high returns on their money, even if the investment vehicle itself was entirely non-productive. Slowly building up enterprises for long-term steady growth was out. Casino capitalism and instant super-profits were in.

Opaque, innovative financial instruments (credit derivatives, CDOs, binary options, credit default swaps, etc) and structured investment vehicles used by hedge funds which are extremely risky, incredibly complex and largely unregulated, ruled the day. These are what Warren Buffett called “financial weapons of mass destruction”.

There is no copyright on financial instruments, so competition between providers inevitably draws more risk for lenders and borrowers. Many investors, superannuants and retirees were entranced with thoughts of short-term, high-profit returns, but had no idea their money was caught up in financial schemes they could not even begin to understand, let alone recover from once the crisis hit.

In this instance, the cost of instant gratification could be measured. An $US8 trillion US housing bubble burst. Accumulated debt, including toxic debts, amounted to $US3 trillion and 3.5% of global GDP. Because banks borrow from each other outside their national jurisdictions, repayment defaults led to a global liquidity crisis – even for those economies such as Australia which were not directly exposed to toxic debt and unsustainable mortgages. Ultimately $US50 trillion was wiped off global assets.

Meanwhile, China’s foreign debt actually decreased relative to its economy, as it became a major lender to other countries, particularly developing nations.

Instant gratification is not always a bad thing. Think of the benefits that microwave ovens and search engines on the internet have brought to our lives. Artificial intelligence, another product of our impatience, will also bring enormous gains (and challenges) when we learn to harness its potential.

Along the way, however, the beauties of delayed gratification may be lost before it is too late to notice their absence and the void they have left in our lives.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-costs-of-impatience-a-psychic-disorder-of-modern-capitalism/

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

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