Delayed gratification

If you have some spare Zapptrottle Mote Extractors, please send it to the embassies of European, especially Eastern-European countries. If you live in the US or in the Asia/Oceania region, you probably have not heard of our gas crisis. In short: gas is the primary source of heating in these countries and the majority of the gas comes from Russia, through Ukraine. These two countries had some debate and in the meantime gas transports halted leaving half of Europe without heating in the middle of a particularly cold winter. Some countries were "luckier" than others having some alternate source. Hungary for example had a huge underground gas storage enough for the people for two months. Industries had to shut down though, losing 0.5% of this year's GDP. In Serbia homes and schools remained without heating in the -15^oC cold.

The reason of this "bad luck" was tolerating a monopoly in the supply of an important item. The reason for this action was simple: an alternative like a new gas pipe under the Black Sea or a new nuclear reactor cost billions of dollars and no one wanted to pay extra tax as long as the gas came. Of course the GDP loss because of the industry shut down cost almost as much as a new reactor and this situation can repeat itself any time because of political debate or a terrorist attack.

The reason of monopolies is bad luck. The Russians did not "earned" to have gas, they were simply lucky for having gas below the surface. However the reason for the survival of monopoly is simply short-sighted thinking. There were issues with the gas previously yet no one wanted to pay the price of the alternative energy source. Breaking the Russian gas monopoly costs lot of money now, and the benefits will only be felt in the future, if the Russian gas stops again.

We faced another ape subroutine: the desire for immediate gratification instead of the greater delayed gratification. The apes were unable to plan for the long run, so they were unable to create subroutines for long term investment. The subroutines that rewarded successful actions now were better than nothing, so these subroutines emerged. We have them in our head. We are all happy when something good happens now. Yet some of us are capable to abandon this instant gratification for something better in the long run.

One of the greatest psychological research was the marshmallow experiment. 4 years old children were given a marshmallow (a type of candy). They could eat it right now, but if they waited, they got further candies. The children were evaluated when they were at the college. Those who were capable of waiting for the candies were much better students (200pt advance on SAT) and had much less juvenile crime and underage pregnancy than the instant eater group. Our ability to resist our ape-subroutines are very important for the success in life.

Ryan mentioned in a comment that grinding (the most time-ineffective activity) is explainable by not peer pressure but risk aversion. Grinding surely provide a few silver coins and vendor trash worth another few coins, while investing may provide better results, but may end up with a loss. This is most probably right, but instant gratification is maybe an even better explanation to this nonsense behavior. Killing a monster give silver coins and trash now, while even mining (which is more or less risk-free) needs hours or even days of waiting for the auction to sell. So our little ape keeps on grinding, and "having fun" (receiving mental gratification) ignoring the fact that is obvious to even non-AH-businessmen: mining, herbing and skinning are better than grinding.

Monopolies grant us instant gratification. We get gas or overpriced crystallized fire now. Breaking the monopoly (building nuclear plant or buying a full eternal fire), costs money now (instant punishment), and will provide reward later.

My advice is obvious: if you depend on a monopolist, break this monopoly. It will cost you an investment now, but it will reward you more. You are at the mercy of the monopolist and he will take advantage of it. Even if you assume that he is "not selfish", you are still at the mercy of his accidental acts. What will happen to my little sheep if I forgot to list enough crystallized fire?

If you often need an item, and see only a few suppliers don't accept their instantly buyable item. Instead:

• research the item (instant loss of time), find out where it drops or who can craft it
• get materials for greater quantity of the item (instant loss of time or money)
• spam trade for crafter (instant loss of time and risk of frustration: maybe no crafter is online/care this evening)
• you will have plenty of this item, so later you won't have to pay for it (delayed gratification)
  

The Standing Dragon wrote an interesting comment: the paladin of Matticus's guild did not put more effort to get gear than his guildmates, he was just lucky to be the only holy paladin. He had a monopoly, therefore he could take advantage of it. To break his monopoly the guild management had to accept lots of small but instant annoyances (punishment) in order to prevent the greater long term loss:

• spend time recruiting another paladin
• take the unpleasant situation of benching the first paladin or other healer to let the new recruit in
• take the extra wipes caused by the new paladin
• take the extra time and unpleasant dilemmas when distributing loot between paladins
• having the long term reward of having two not burned out and geared paladins.

Another, funny but true example from a commenter, who was kind to contribute to the quality of this site by fixing lot of grammar errors: "Another example, Greedy Goblin did not take time to properly learn English (instant punishment [for a kid, learning grammar is felt that way]) and now is unable to write high quality posts in English because of this."

PS: grammar correction notes will be deleted according to the commenting rules, but very welcomed.