In the late 1960s, at a nursery school on the campus of Stanford University, Walter Mischel, an Austrian-born psychologist, began an experiment involving four-year-olds and marshmallows. He offered the children a tempting choice -- they could have one marshmallow right away, or if they waited a few minutes, they could have two marshmallows. The kids struggled mightily, trying to avoid eating the delicious treat right away, but only about thirty percent were able to delay gratification even for a few minutes.
Mischel's experiments spawned a whole range of studies into the mechanics of delayed gratification. No matter where these studies led -- and they were often inconclusive -- they always returned to a fundamental question for human beings -- do we eat the marshmallow now or later? Do we postpone immediate pleasure for some future reward? Do we embrace the pleasure principle or do we override it -- either in the name of some overarching principle or simply because it will benefit us to wait?
Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern thinkers to tackle this question in his structural model of the human psyche. In Freud's view, the id is a fundamental component of our personality that works to satisfy our basic urges, needs and desires. Freud's id was based on the pleasure principle, which says that people will seek pleasure and avoid pain in order to meet their biological and psychological needs. The id doesn't care about reality or the needs of others. It seeks only its own satisfaction.
Over the past fifty years, the pleasure principle -- the id -- has dominated American society. From the "me" generation of the 1970s to the wretched excesses of the 2000s, there has been a disturbing shift in American values from community responsibility to individual gratification, from long-term investment to short-term profit, from self-sacrifice to instant reward. The result has been "idonomics" -- in which the pleasure principle dominates not only the marketplace, but also our politics, media, technology and even our personal relationships.
It's pretty easy to see how idonomics operates in the economic sphere. Executives pump up their stock price even as their companies are at risk. Or the young couple signs up for a no-money-down, zero-income offer to buy a house or a car. It's easy to ignore the consequences of a million individual economic decisions until they add up to one great big systemic risk, as we discovered during the 2008 financial meltdown that precipitated the Great Recession.
It's not only in the economic sphere that idonomics wreaks havoc. Federal budget deficits have skyrocketed as politicians promised voters the pleasures of generous government programs without the pain of paying for them -- a textbook example of idonomics in action. In health care, we've been practicing idonomics instead of good medicine as drug companies spend millions of dollars on researching new drugs to treat impotence, weight loss and aging while ignoring drugs used to cure deadly illnesses. In the media world, idonomics meant the pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of long-term quality. In technology, money goes to speculative investment and new consumer devices rather than to solving the energy crisis or improving infrastructure.
Idonomics has even infected our cultural values and personal relationships. Looking around America today, you see a decline in our time-honored values of responsibility, respect and a concern for others. How often do you see a young man to offer his seat on the bus to an old lady or pregnant woman? What about the woman chatting loudly on her cell phone in the supermarket? While these may seem like small matters, they are indicative of a much bigger trend in our society -- the arrival of cultural idonomics. This "me first" attitude has also impacted our personal relationships. Since the 1980s, the divorce rate has tripled in most Western countries, including the United States. Marriage, like all personal relationships, requires hard work and an investment in the future. It requires deferred gratification and self-sacrifice, neither of which have a place in idonomics.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to undo the damage of idonomics. Willpower alone -- just saying "no" to the pursuit of pleasure -- certainly won't work. However, research by Mischel and others suggest that there are techniques that humans can use to defer immediate gratification. The four-year-olds in his study who avoided focusing on the marshmallows by covering their eyes or singing songs were able to hold off. Another technique was "peer modeling," in which children who were shown a video of a child using distraction techniques were able to successfully delay gratification. While overcoming the societal dynamic of idonomics is a tougher challenge, the Great Recession has provided a powerful opportunity for our society to change course. Profound lessons about risk and the unbridled pursuit of pleasure often make a lasting imprint. But we must be continually reminded of those lessons, which we can too easily forget.
For fifty years, the American Dream has been jeopardized by the unrestrained pursuit of the pleasure principle. Can the American Dream survive idonomics? Absolutely. We don't need to embrace a new Puritanism or extreme self-sacrifice. With a combination of traditional American values of common sense, along with newer research techniques for promoting deferred gratification, we can certainly get back on the right path. If we think of idonomics as the fevered frenzy of the past, and begin to build our economy, our institutions and even our families on a more solid, practical foundation, we can overcome the excesses of the past and return the American Dream to its rightful place.
Hoyt Hilsman is an award-winning writer, critic and former Congressional candidate. He is the author of "Idonomics: How the Pleasure Principle is Destroying the American Dream"