Time Preference
philosophy · intermediate
How much you prefer present consumption to future consumption. Low time preference is the willingness to defer gratification.
An economic concept formalized by the Austrian school — von Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, Rothbard. Everyone has positive time preference: a marshmallow now beats a marshmallow next year. Civilizations differ in how steep the curve is. Low-time-preference societies save, build, and pass infrastructure down. High-time-preference societies consume, borrow, and discount the future.
Saifedean Ammous's argument in *The Bitcoin Standard* is that sound money lowers time preference at the margin: when your savings hold value, deferring consumption is rational. When inflation makes saving punitive, the rational move is to spend or to lever up, both of which raise time preference. Bitcoin, in this view, isn't just a hedge — it's a civilizational input that changes how people relate to the future.
The critique: it's a stylized argument, hard to test, and not all monetary debasement maps cleanly onto behavior changes. But the framing is useful for understanding why people who care about Bitcoin often talk less about price and more about decades.