Knowledge And Decisions

Differences in time horizons among social groups change the effectiveness of social policies involving either benefits or penalties, especially when one social group, with a given time horizon, predominates among the policy makers and another social group, with a different time horizon, predominates among those to whom the policy applies. For example, “job training” programs which require present efforts to increase prospective employment and earnings sometime in the future may prove relatively ineffective with age, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups with short time horizons. Participation in such programs may be based on such current opportunities as these programs present, and maximizing benefits at least cost may mean maximizing in the short run sense of doing as little as possible to receive the financial or other immediate benefits from the program — which is to say, preparing for future employment as little as possible. The attempt to use such future-oriented programs as means of luring present-oriented youngsters away from crime runs up against the fact that “most crimes are committed opportunistically by youths who want small amounts of money right away.”² A job training program may well increase the youth’s earnings ability by many times what he can successfully steal, provided that both calculations are made over a long enough time span, but if his time horizon is shorter than the program, none of its future benefits may enter his calculation — which may nevertheless be as rational within his time horizon as the opposite result is for those with a longer time horizon. No one has an unlimited time horizon, and there is no logically compelling objective reason for preferring one time horizon to another.

Jobs are a meaningful alternative to crime when the jobs have similarly short time dimensions. The availability of casual, day-to-day jobs is apparently inversely correlated with petty crime rates. Where the opportunity for such pickup jobs is reduced — as by bad weather — petty crimes tend to increase, since people who live from day to day “have to eat” when the jobs stop and seldom have much money saved.³

One of the reasons why relatively simple precautions reduce the incidence of crime is the short time horizon of many criminals. Almost no feasible precaution can make it impossible to steal, break-in, or victimize by violence. But merely by raising the immediate cost — in time, effort, or risk — it discourages many whose aversion to perseverance and postponed benefits is part of the reason for their being criminals. Few homes are burglar-proof and few people mugger-proof, but the incidence of burglary is much lower in New York than in Los Angeles while the incidence of mugging is just the reverse, because access to New York apartments is usually a little more difficult than in Los Angeles (due to architectural style differences) and access to people to mug is somewhat more difficult in Los Angeles (due to fewer pedestrians in residential neighborhoods). Apparently criminals are rational within their framework. One of the reasons for the absence of simple precautions is the subsidization of losses: insurance policies spread and thus minimize the impact of the cost of theft; police property recovery costs paid for by the taxpayers likewise reduce the connection between carelessness and consequences; “victim compensation” policies by government extends this externalization of costs still further. Insofar as individual precautions merely cause the criminal to turn to someone else as an easier victim, the private benefits exceed the social benefits. An argument might be made for legal compulsion to reduce vulnerability in general — antitheft devices in cars, better locks required by building codes, brighter lighted streets, etc. — but since such requirements would be categorical rather than incremental, they could easily go past the point where the benefits balanced the costs.

THE ANIMISTIC FALLACY

From the point of view of the social utilization of knowledge, time permits entirely different methods for the production and distribution of knowledge from those usually conceived of, and does not depend upon articulation, rationality, cognition, or any of the other formal processes taught in academic institutions. With unlimited time, either the processes of nature or the competition among men may lead to an intricate pattern of results unplanned by anybody. The fitness or accuracy of these systemic adaptations may be revealed primarily — or even exclusively — in results rather than in articulated rationality. But because man insists on some articulated explanation after the fact, an explanation which overlooks the crucial role of time may emerge as a wholly different — and wholly fallacious — depiction of what has happened.