Monday, June 24, 2013

The Baby Boomers and their Descendants, delayed gratification

One of the strangest symptoms, or at least most puzzling to me, is the post sexual revolution problem with delayed gratification. If you're not familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, do yourself a favor and click over to Wikipedia to read about it. The earlier Trinidad candy experiment may hold a clue, but it was a very small statistically insignificant sample size. The clue: Children whose fathers have left the home, did poorly. The more recent Rocester Experiment suggests that children who have been lied to, who have been let down by adults, have a harder time with delayed gratification.

One thing I noticed growing up in the 1970s, was the odd tendency of sexually promiscuous adults to be less than honest with children. This does lead me to wonder if the sexual revolution has had a negative economic side effect on Americans and Europeans with respect to delayed gratification, which is of course a predictor of economic and personal success.

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
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