Malthus’ Marshmallow

By Gordon Hull

We’ve all heard of a version of the experiment: you set a kid down with a marshmallow, and tell him that if he can sit there and not eat it for a while, he can have two.  Some kids can do it, and others can’t.  A famous paper suggests that whether the child has the willpower to wait is predictive of his future success in life.  Apparently, not so much.  According to a piece by Jessica McCrory Calarco in the Atlantic, new research casts this finding into doubt.  It seems that the original study enrolled fewer than 90 children, all of them selected from Stanford’s lab school.  Let’s just call that an unrepresentative sample.  A new, larger and more representative study concludes that willpower isn’t what’s driving the result; it’s socioeconomic status.  As Calarco puts it, “the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.”  For example, once you factor in whether the mother has a college degree or not, the children’s ability to wait wasn’t predictive:

“This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in. Similarly, among kids whose mothers did not have college degrees, those who waited did no better than those who gave in to temptation, once other factors like household income and the child’s home environment at age 3 (evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence) were taken into account. For those kids, self-control alone couldn’t overcome economic and social disadvantages.”

This should not be a surprise.  I live in the city with the worst social mobility in the country, and your SES at birth even in the best of U.S. cities does a pretty good job of predicting your life chances.  This lack of socioeconomic mobility, and its differentiation by geography, can be taken as corroborating evidence that the willpower explanation is the wrong one.

One reason the marshmallow experiment is worth noting is that it debunks (again!) a favorite neoliberal talking point, which is that it’s your fault if you don’t make it.  It turns out that having willpower or not doesn’t help you if you’re poor, no matter how many times Paul Ryan says it.  A second, more interesting, reason is that it underscores not only the degree to which this sort of economic rationality (in this case, the ability to overcome discounting of the future) is a learned behavior, but also that the idea that economic rationality is something the poor (especially the non-white poor) really, really ought to develop, is an ideological one from the start. And it specifically has to do with delayed gratification for food.  In a fantastic paper, Ute Tellmann traces the ideology to Malthus, and suggests that for Malthus the real problem is not scarcity per se, but the fact that “savage life” is characterized by an inability to delay gratification:

“A close reading of the Essay on Population reveals that the principle of population is nothing but the ‘law’ of savage life. The catastrophic rise of population results from the immediacy by which these reproducing bodies react to any increase of subsistence. Humans, animals and plants are equally governed by the laws of life itself” (144).

As she adds:

“To present the ‘savages’ as ‘presentist animals’ without any sense of history is a common colonial trope (Spurr, 1994). The principle of population is linked to this common narrative about savage life: it is because savage life reacts immediately with its procreative consumption to any resource offered to it that the population will exceed the resources available to it in the future. The mathematical expression of the law of population – famously depicted by the divergence of a geometric and arithmetic rate of growth in population and in foodstuff – needs to be related to this discursive articulation of savage life, to its blindness and lack of futurity, for being adequately understood” (144-5).

On this reading, recognizing the principle of scarcity, which is marked by the ability to delay gratification for food, is an epistemic virtue for Malthus, and one that needs to be inculcated into the poor (Tellmann also makes this in an earlier paper) – especially racial minorities.  The Malthusian problem isn’t the finitude of our resources; it’s how we respond to that finitude.  As she notes, this is a departure from Adam Smith, who thinks that we naturally are inclined to better our conditions.  For Malthus, “responsibilization is embedded within a differential politics of affect that revolved around hope and fear as the means for teaching savage life the virtues of scarcity” (147).  Being an epistemically responsible person means that you can wait to eat, and being able to wait to eat means that you believe that you have a better future to invest in.

Tellmann’s paper is well-worth the read independently of marshmallows, as she presents this reading of Malthus as a complicating factor for the Foucauldian account of the emergence of governmentality and biopolitics.  In the context of the marshmallow experiment, it shows that there is a straight line to be drawn from Malthus to Becker (for whom this sort of economic rationality is always descriptively helpful in describing behavior; compare his need for a completely ad hoc explanation for why the young engage in risky health behavior)  to Paul Ryan and the claim that welfare just teaches the poor not to work.  Within that space, the marshmallow experiment functions ideologically as a form of neoliberal subjectification, because it lets you tell the poor kid that he’s irrational for eating the marshmallow; this then becomes a justification for blaming him for his own poverty and teaching him to behave "rationally."  But of course he’s not irrational.  As Calarco puts it in the Atlantic, the class explanation lets you immediately understand the poor child’s behavior as eminently rational.  For that child, “daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.”

So let’s stop blaming the kids, because doing so insulates one from the need to ask about structural reasons why kids might be poor in the first place.