Bitcoin Standard Ch. 5
The key concept to understand from this chapter is "time preference". You can understand time preference if you think of the classic experiment with kids and marshmallows. Here's a marshmallow. You can eat it now, but if you wait fifteen minutes, I'll give you another one. Children with high time preferences eat the marshmallow immediately. Children with low time preferences wait for the double reward. In economic terms, when you are confident that your money will retain or increase its value, you have a low time preference, you are willing to be patient as you collect interest or invest in order to have more money in the future. If your money is rapidly losing value, you are better off spending it now, as you will not have enough to buy the same things in the future; you have a high time preference. Societies with sound money have low time preferences. This allows them to invest in innovation and future growth. This is essential for the growth of civilization not j