Motus Mentis

I’m 65, soon to be 66. My lovely wife Nina is about a year-and-a-half older. (She “robbed the cradle”!)

We are already both eligible for Social Security. Neither of us had been planning to file for it yet, though, because for each year you wait (until you’re 70), the benefit rate that you lock in increases by 8% above your full-retirement-age benefit. So if you aren’t desperate to get the money flowing in your sixties (we aren’t), and you are in good enough health to expect to live a long time yet (we are, and we do), then it makes sense to wait until you’re 70 to file your claim — which is what we have always planned to do.

Here in America, in my lifetime, all you had to think about when making this calculation were these two factors: how urgently you needed to get the extra income, and what you thought your life expectancy might be. But there was, in this reasoning, a hidden premise, so obviously true that it didn’t need to be brought into the light: that as you lived through your retirement, however long it might be, the United States of America would be able to keep its promises, and to write the checks.

The other day I found myself wondering if I was still sure enough about this to arrive at the same conclusion. I think the answer is no, and we will probably hedge our bet by having Nina start taking her benefits this October, three years ahead of schedule. Things are very uncertain now, and we might as well get what we can while we can.

I have no doubt that others are making the same re-evaluation of their prospects. Just now on Twitter someone tweeted the following thing:

Saving money during a period of extreme economic instability in which it’s possible that the markets could crash at any moment seems a bit of a waste no? Spend it all and spend it exuberantly.

This is, I’m sorry to say, completely rational. The essence of civilization itself, the fundamental organizing principle, is “low time-preference”: the belief that it makes sense to defer present consumption in order to reap a worthwhile dividend in the future. Without that belief, nobody would build, sacrifice, or invest anything. Why should they? Low time-preference is only a rational choice if you have good reason to believe that you can predict the future state of the system you are living in. Building, investing, planting seeds, etc. — all of these are, in essence, making a contract with the future.

Only stable civilizations can sign such contracts. This makes them infinitely precious, because civilizations in turn depend, for their coming into existence, on there being enough people with enough faith in the system to invest in its future — to sign that contract. This bootstrapping easily fails to work, and most attempts fail before long.

There’s a fatal risk, however, which is that when a civilization has achieved such rare success that it runs without failing for a long-enough span of generations, it can be easy to take the whole thing for granted — as just an eternally existing feature of the natural world — and to forget just how rare and fragile and precious high civilizations really are, and to forget also (or never even learn, if the taking-for-granted has gone far enough) just what virtues, duties, and precautions are required of their citizens in order to keep the thing going.

When this happens — when there is this sort of decay in the quality and understanding and virtue of the people, and they become fat and entitled, ungrateful for the mansion their ancestors built them, and careless of their duties of stewardship, things begin to unravel. This happens slowly at first, almost imperceptibly — but there comes a time when it gradually seeps into the common awareness that the future is less certain. This in turn fosters a narrowing presentism: a decreasing confidence in tomorrow’s ability to guarantee payment for the labors and investments we make today.

Now we enter a vicious circle: the breakdown of the predictable future in a collapsing civilization makes low time-preference less and less of a smart bet. This (perfectly rational) new reluctance to trust the stability of the system, and to invest in the future, further destabilizes everything, making the future even less certain — and so the cycle accelerates. What began as a slight and gradual declension suddenly becomes, once a “tipping point” is reached, a catastrophic failure.

Am I wrong to think this is happening here? I doubt it. How far along are we? All I can say is that it may be later than you think. Plan accordingly.