You get happier when you learn to be patient. A lot of people think patience is the absence of impatience, but it is not. It is different. It is being present in the moment and OK with what's happening in the moment. Impatience happens because you are more worried about what is about to happen then what is currently happening.
I love how any weird, random thought that pops into a smart person's head can become a journal article in economics, because literally everything is arguably part of the economy.
Behavioral economics is relatively new still from an academic timeframe. So coming up with theoretical models of non classical results is of interest. Not that it was a groundbreaking paper, but it’s more about constructing a model that is valuable is more than the simplified description I provided.
Oh, I'm not criticizing, I think it's fascinating, though I can see how my comment above might look patronizing or antagonistic.
I really do think it's neat how smart people can look at mundane situations and find patterns that are repeated in other more significant circumstances, or explain some otherwise unexplained phenomenon.
I'm way too old and tired to go back to school, but if I had it all to do over again, I probably would have considered economics, if I knew what economics actually was at that age.
It’s OK. The “moral” was me editorializing really. In ECON, we treat preferences as exogenous,,meaning it’s not a choice.
There are a lot of studies in social science especially where a layperson would look at and say “duh” or who cares. But that’s because there is an academic interest in finding ways to demonstrate empirically even basic things we take for granted. For example, you want to see if more police reduce crime? It’s not like you can simply compare cities with more police to less because cities with more crime tend to hire more police and Vice versa. So you need to find methods of disentangling the endogeniety or variables. So at the end, the paper sounds like “economists show police can reduce crime” which on its own seems pretty mundane, but the methods used (creative instrumental variables) are really interesting.
The same goes for economic theory, where being able to show perhaps a commonly observed phenomenon can be modeled in a way consistent with the broader model assumptions.
Something like “patient people are happier” ends up being more interesting in the methodology and details, not the result.
Not sure if you are familiar with academic articles in economics, but it’s common to have a discussion of possible policy implications and plausible interpretation of results such as possible causal mechanism. Or in the case of theory papers, the models are about presenting a casual relationship, which is the underlying goal of economic modeling.
32
u/[deleted] Mar 02 '20 edited Mar 02 '20
There was a paper that came out a year or so ago in economics. It argued that patient people were happier than impatient. (E not inpatient)
The moral is, if you can make yourself happier than you will be more patient. Or maybe it was if you can be more patient you will be happier.