Knowledge And Decisions

In social as in economic processes, the value of anything varies with the time at which it becomes available. This applies both to benefits and to costs. Swift punishment for criminals has long been recognized as a more effective deterrent than the same punishment applied after much delay. By implication, a lesser punishment applied immediately — the old fashioned “curbstone justice” once applied by the policeman on the spot — may be as effective as a harsher punishment applied after years of “due process.” Due process may be preferred for its greater accuracy, objectivity, or dignity, but the point here is that there is a trade-off, based on the varying cost of punishment to the recipient according to its location in time.

In economics, a financial increment or decrement accompanies transfers of given physical or money units back and forth through time. The absence of explicit interest payments in social trade-offs does not mean that the same principle is not at work. Because imprisonment is costly to the taxpayers as well as to the criminal, a shorter sentence begun soon that is as effective as a longer sentence begun later means money savings for a given deterrent. Alternatively, the law could retain the same length of sentence and achieve more deterrence for a given amount of money, if that was preferred. In other words, the implicit “interest” received by the public for moving imprisonment forward in time can be either in money or in kind. Conversely, losses incurred by moving imprisonment backward in time by lengthening legal “due process” may also be costly both in money and in kind, including crimes committed by criminals free on bail, awaiting trial or appeal.

TIME HORIZONS

In social trade-offs in general, the diminishing value of deferred benefits or costs is often referred to in terms of the time required for such benefits or costs to reach the vanishing point as influences on present decision making. This period is the individual’s “time horizon.” Time horizons are subjective. They vary not only from individual to individual, but from one socioeconomic class to another, among ethnic groups, or among age brackets. Ironically, older individuals may have longer time horizons than younger, more impetuous, individuals, even though, objectively, younger people generally have more years of life ahead of them. But older people’s plans often extend well beyond their own life span, as in decisions made for their children’s well-being — the preservation of an estate, or in extreme cases, suicide by parents who consider themselves “burdens” to their children (once generalized among Eskimos) — or the older person’s time horizon often includes concern for their own good name after death which serves as motivation for decisions involving philanthropy, religious conversion, or a place in history. For younger people the end of their own life is often beyond their time horizon, and these post-death concerns still more so. It may well be that the time horizon lengthens with the birth of children and the assumption of a parental outlook, not only as regards one’s own children in particular but posterity in general. Whatever the cause, a time horizon extending beyond the lifetime of the individual becomes a spontaneous moral control on individual action, analogous to moral constraints extending in space at a given time.