This is a terrific video on time perspective. (Hat tip: Keith Rabin)
It's about our choice in viewing life in terms of future or present/past orientation.
As RSA Animate's Philip Zimbardo concludes "It's really the most simple thing there is!"
It seems simple but it is complex because people have different time scale weightings.
Yet this video goes in true fashion with Austrian Economics, where time preference plays a key role in people's choices and thus shape distribution and consumption patterns.
Here is Ludwig von Mises on time preference... (bold highlights mine)
``Time for man is not a homogeneous substance of which only length counts. It is not a more or a less in dimension. It is an irreversible flux the fractions of which appear in different perspective according to whether they are nearer to or remoter from the instant of valuation and decision. Satisfaction of a want in the nearer future is, other things being equal, preferred to that in the farther distant future. Present goods are more valuable than future goods.
``Time preference is a categorial requisite of human action. No mode of action can be thought of in which satisfaction within a nearer period of the future is not--other things being equal--preferred to that in a later period. The very act of gratifying a desire implies that gratification at the present instant is preferred to that at a later instant. He who consumes a nonperishable good instead of postponing consumption for an indefinite later moment thereby reveals a higher valuation of present satisfaction as compared with later satisfaction. If he were not to prefer satisfaction in a nearer period of the future to that in a remoter period, he would never consume and so satisfy wants. He would always accumulate, he would never consume and enjoy. He would not consume today, but he would not consume tomorrow either, as the morrow would confront him with the same alternative."
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