An important tenet of many organised religions is the concept of delayed gratification. This can be seen as a measure of self-control, self-discipline and self-organisation – all of which are in theory helpful to the leading of a happy and at the same time socially responsible existence. Many psychologists, perhaps most notably Freud, tested the concept of delayed gratification on children – and it’s has been widely recognised to be an important guide to the probable future success as those children pass into adulthood.

Life throws up many opportunities where we have to make decisions of this nature – do we want to have some jam today, or more jam tomorrow…and how much jam tomorrow would compensate for not having any jam today. Some Christian approaches may even suggest that we would not need to have any more jam tomorrow to compensate for no jam today, because the very process of self-discipline would actually increase the satisfaction of the same amount of jam tomorrow. I think everybody has experienced this concept – a piece of chocolate that has been promised as a reward for finishing the housework, the pint of beer after a long days walking.

Delayed gratification has lost its appeal in many western societies over the past 20-30 years. Perhaps a decline in religious leadership of our societies, or the rapid development of ‘on demand’ services, from media to finance, to travel and so on. There are plenty of reasons why, but it is certainly the case that gratification has become more immediate. As a child i can certainly recall delayed gratification as being central to my parents approach to parenthood. As children our weekly pocket money was paid every saturday morning, and we were given 10p for every year of age we were. The pocket money was never, ever paid before the Saturday morning, no matter how much pleading took place. I recall on one occasion, when i was eight years old coming back from our local park after Saturday morning football, and going with my Dad to our local newsagent (The Grange Star, Rathfarnham); Dad was picking up the papers and handed me my 80p pocket money for the week. I headed into the shop with him and surreptiously bought eighty 1p sweets (a truly glutenous performance). On returning to the car my Dad saw the substantial bag i was carrying and asked knowingly what i had bought. I hesitantly answered truthfully and proceeded to get an ear bashing for my totally reckless, greedy spending.

These sorts of reactions did not stem from any particular religious inclination, but i think my parents understood, perhaps intuitively (more probably from their parents) that it is an important life skill. Stories of my maternal grandfather working for the Bank or Ireland through the 50s and 60s, and his client relationships with farmers, shopkeepers and small business owners in the west of ireland were full of indirect tales of delayed gratification. The ‘on demand’ world that we exist in would have been inexplicable to them.

The financial mire that we are heading into could be directly attributable to the fall of the importance of delayed gratification. The credit expansion that has taken place since the early 80s, driven by low interest rates has been a grand borrowing against future income taken to excess. In banking terms we would call this the ‘discount rate’ – the rate of interest that we would use to discount a future sum of money into a figure today. As world wide interest rates fell, the true discount rate fell too…the real value of holding money in savings accounts dropped preciptously. The opportunity cost of spending was reduced to virtually nothing in the US where real interest rates during the Greenspan years were negative.

In my time working in the world of investment banking, the system encouraged short-termism and the ‘jam today’ mentality. From compensation packages to accounting approaches money tomorrow was a distant relation to money today. The same sadly held true as it now seems through broad swaths of western economies…from individuals, banks and in some of the worst cases governments. In the US, the fact that it has historically had a savings rate that hovered near zero, and at times was negative suggests that delayed purchases were not on the agenda. Sadly this doesn’t create happier lives in the long run. In our societies the concept of success is measured in immediate ways – a new car, a new house, the biggest TV, the most exotic holiday.

What is going to be tricky is reversing this process. The American novellist Thomas Perry once said that “Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience”. As recessions grip in various parts of the world people are going to have to find a way to make these things interesting again.