Is it worse to be impatient or greedy? Technically, greed is one of the seven deadly sins so it’s already making a strong case for itself. In this, I fall back on my general tendency to focus on impact more than intention. I despise people with bad intentions, but I despise real human suffering even more. Naturally, I despise the part of me that harbors greed and bad intentions.
Let’s dissect this a bit, non-rigorously. You might be greedy, but also lazy. If you end up not acting on your greed (aka committing a negative act) then life for everyone else is pretty okay. We may even mistakenly admire you because we won’t know that actually you are greedy. That’s fine.
Some greedy people do act and we don’t like them, but my personal view is that most people are trivially greedy. They either don’t feel that strongly or don’t have the right outlets or aren’t smart enough to do that much harm. For the small percent that is very capable and very greedy, in a best case their negative impact is averaged out over a much larger population so still we are okay-ish. Not to forget, there are some rare saints offsetting some of this greed. There certainly are scenarios where everyone can suffer significantly by the actions of a few, and that’s unfortunate. It’s a little bit of karma that oftentimes but not always the greed ends up ruining a person in some way or other since they can’t reign their greed in and that causes some sort of figurative death spiral -> stress, loss of trust in relationships, bankruptcy, etc. Anyway, the point is greed is distasteful but it’s not clear that its net impact is super bad or that it’s always acted on.
The same is not true for impatience. Almost by definition, impatience pushes us to action, often prematurely. What does this mean? It means we are prone to screw ourselves up because we can’t slow things down. Forget about good intentions and bad intentions. I think good decisions represent a pretty small percent of total possible actions – that’s why we spend so much time thinking (and still make mistakes!) to try to make a good decision. Acting prematurely significantly increases the likelihood of mistakes and judgment errors which will lead on average to more harm and more suffering. AND, it’s not a select few people being very impatient like in the case of greed, it is almost everyone. So, on average the whole population is doing things that do harm and collectively create a very bad impact on the world.
So, I think impatience is worse than greed, based on this non-scientific and untested “math”. I’ll elaborate with a non-math example.
If I am driving on an interstate at the speed limit (aka being patient) and everyone else is also driving the speed limit, there should be little risk of a collision. Take a more extreme example, a race car going close to 200 mph. At higher speeds they are more susceptible to damage than I am from an equal small change in inputs (pebble on the road, gust of wind, swerve from oncoming obstacle). With an unexpected obstacle, I should have enough time to brake safely (because I wasn’t speeding) or control of the car to swerve out of the way (because I wasn’t speeding). If a racecar tries to change direction too quickly, it could flip. Obviously, the racecar is more at risk and ultimately will get harmed in a world where there will be an infinite amount of random stimuli (think entropy). Per the book Antifragile, actually the faster we go we expose ourselves to exponentially more harm which is even worse.
I think something similar has been going on with economic growth. We can’t resist speeding and we make ourselves vulnerable in the process. We want to grow grow grow, and fast like a racecar. When driving, it’s mathematically easy to show that speeding over a commute has no significant impact on the total time traveled. [Actually, I think urban driving is an edge case, because the majority of a commute with traffic can come from a handful of red lights so if speeding helps you avoid 1 or 2 red lights, you may actually save a lot of time. I’m not telling you to speed, it’s just the math.] Let’s assume we are driving on an interstate, then the gain of speeding isn’t that great. Maybe it’s not so different from our economic growth. Instead of getting to X GDP in 20 years we got there in 15 years, what’s the point? Why can’t we just clip along at a comfortable pace if humanity will be more or less the same anyway like an ETA that changes by 2 minutes? This is different from the idea that revolutionary inventions jolt the world forward in a step-function way because even though that is probably true, we could resume a comfortable growth pace after the big step forward. We get too eager, too greedy?
Sure, a skilled driver can safely slow a racecar with a combo of expertise and precisely tuned high-performance parts. The economy is very different from a racecar in this regard. The economy is much more complex, with non-linear relationships that make it hard to predict / see obstacles to avoid. Instead of high performance brakes and tires, we have those tools monetary and fiscal policy that get discussed in the news. Simplistically, monetary policy is the Federal Reserve setting interest rates which creates ripple effects, and fiscal policy is the budget decisions of the US government like if it will run a deficit (spend more than it takes in in taxes) or even raise taxes. These two tools are the opposite of finely tuned. It’s like playing a video game where the instructions say space bar is for jump but sometimes when you press space bar the character ducks instead – and you don’t know why (despite thinking you found a plausible reason after the fact).
So, what is the point? We are impatient, we do things too quickly and then try to slow down without having tools for the job. Ultimately, instead of coming to a halt, we crash. This doesn’t mean the whole economy or world crashes, but that there is a major destruction of value somewhere, and often that loss is borne by the 99% not the 1% -> too much human suffering. Try to be patient. Think first, then act aggressively if needed, don’t just act aggressively.
