Download patience_capital_and_the_demise_of_the_aristocracy.pdf
I'm not sure I buy the premise of the above paper on 'Patience capital and the demise of the aristocracy', but it's an interesting one, and some of the arguments are interesting. For instance, there's a good point about the fact that urban artisans had a life characterised by a steep income slope (making nothing as an apprentice, pretty little as a journeyman, and hopefully a good deal more as a master) that encouraged long-term planning and financial discipline; this in contrast to those (both poor and rich) in rural areas, for whom the land was worth basically the same when they were 20 as when they were 60. For the latter, lifetime income had more of a tendency to be flat from year to year; thus notions of investment in the future and the accumulation of capital would have been less salient - or so goes the theory. (See bottom of page for data on the landed aristocracy's attitude to business.)
Most interesting for my studies, though, is the notion of patience capital (think the Marshmallow Test, and the ways in which parents strive to teach their children patience and other key non-cognitive skills) is an interesting one.
It may be particularly related to positive outcomes for low-income children who attend decent daycare programmes, argue some. Remember, these kids - eg in the Abecedarian or Perry High Scope project - tend not to show greater cognitive development than their peers over time, but they do show better outcomes. Here's a snippet:
Heckman (2000)
and Heckman and Krueger (2003) review the evidence from a large number of
programs targeting disadvantaged children through family development sup-
port. They show that most programs were successful in permanently raising the
treated children’s non-cognitive skills, turning them more motivated to learn,
less likely to engage in crime, and altogether more future-oriented than children
of non-treated families. On the other hand, the programs were less successful in
raising cognitive skills as measured by IQ test scores.3 The most effective pro-
grams where those targeted to children at a young age, although positive effects
are also documented for programs targeting adolescents. These studies show
how important family transmission is in this particular form of human capital
accumulation, of which the notion of patience discussed in this paper is a com-
ponent. Similar conclusions are reached by a number of studies in child develop-
ment psychology (see e.g., Goleman 1995, Shonkoff and Philips 2000 and Taylor,
McGue, and Iacono 2000). Coleman and Hoffer (1983) argue that the emphasis
on patience and self-discipline is the key of the effectiveness of Catholic schools
in the US. [p 8]
There's also an argument in there that would be useful for understanding cultural transmission, eg through engaging in Lareau-ish analysis of parenting styles:
In our model, in contrast, parents invest in their children’s patience. In this re-
spect, our paper is related to the growing literature on cultural transmission (e.g.,
Bisin and Verdier 2000 and 2001, Hauk and Saez-Marti 2002, Saez-Marti and
Zenou 2004).5 In this literature, parents evaluate their children’s life prospects
from the standpoint of their own preferences, and actively try to manipulate chil-
dren’s preference to induce choices that parents regard as desirable. As these
papers, we argue that economic incentives are crucial in determining the effort
parents exert in affecting their children’s preferences. [p 10]
OK, up above I promised data on the landed aristocracy's attitudes to business. (it's really worth having a look at the table in the pdf; for some reason I can't seem to paste it into this post.)
Table 2 reports the professional choice of Cambridge graduates during
the period 1750–1899. The vast majority of students at Cambridge during this pe-
riod were sons of members of the landowning class, so their professional choices
(other than landowning) give us a good idea of which professions younger sons
entered. Strikingly, until 1850, not a single graduate got involved in banking or
business (widely defined as any “profit-oriented activity”), and even after 1850
the percentage remains surprisingly low.
