Why do some people prosper while others fail? Why is economic output per person seven times higher on one side of the US-Mexico border than on the other? Why is the average Canadian twelve times richer than the average Moroccan, despite having similar size populations?

We are often invited to believe that a society’s relative success has a lot to do with its geography or climate. Not so.

There are plenty of resource-rich countries in Africa, blessed in every imaginable way by geography and climate, that still produce only grinding poverty. Conversely, there are plenty of resource-poor places, such as Japan or Iceland, that prosper.

Much more important than a country’s natural resources is its political economy.

If property rights are insecure, power arbitrary and taxes high, a society will remain poor. If, on the other hand, people are free to spend more of their own money and make their own choices for themselves and their families, society overall will thrive.

Perhaps the single best illustration of this is Korea. Since the end of the Korean War, the Korean peninsula has been divided. North Korea has been run by a communist dictatorship, under which there are no property rights and rules for everything, including what you can wear. South Korea, especially since the 1980s, is an open, free-market society, with relatively low taxes and light regulation.

The North today can barely feed itself. The South is as wealthy as Europe or the US.

Korea shows us what happens when a society is subjected to two different extremes – one free market, the other a tyranny.

Making sure that every society is run along free market principles is essential to maximize prosperity. But even with the most liberty-minded policies in place, would everyone in a free market society flourish or otherwise prosper?

In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist, Walter Mischel, undertook a famous experiment. He offered kids a marshmallow on the understanding that they could either eat the marshmallow right away, or they could wait a few minutes and have two.

What Mischel was doing was measuring each child’s time preferences. Those kids that were prepared to wait had what we call a low-time preference. The less patient kids that opted to have one marshmallow right away, had what we call a higher time preference.

Having assessed each kid’s time preference, Mischel then tracked their progress over the years that followed. He discovered a startling correlation between having a low time preference (being prepared to wait) with academic and other kinds of success. Those inclined towards instant gratification, his research seemed to suggest, would be less successful.

Time preferences, it seems, play an important part in how we as individuals do. Might time preferences also have a role in explaining the different trajectories societies take?

Could it be that the USA, Canada, Finland and Japan are relatively rich and prosper because they are countries with low time preferences? There is a body of evidence to suggest that poorer countries, like Mexico and Russia, have higher time preferences, and that really poor countries like Tanzania and Nigeria have really high time preferences.

The conventional explanation for this is that prosperity produces lower time preferences. Might it not be the case that lower time preferences produce prosperity?

If being wealthy explained your time preferences, not the other way around, you might expect that people with comparable incomes in different countries had similar time preferences. They don’t. As with Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, the implication is that time preferences impact outcomes, not the other way around.

Mainstream economists have a lot to say about how individuals transact with other individuals. They less often look at how we as individuals transact with our future selves.

Surely how people in a society transact with their future selves is critical in explaining economic outcomes? In a society with a low time preference, people are more likely to defer consumption and save. Dropout rates in education are likely to be lower. Capital and knowledge will accumulate from one generation to the next.

Time preferences are a key factor driving a society’s economic development. What about propensity to commit crime? Presumably, if you are willing to risk seeing your future self sent to prison in return for the chance of an immediate material reward you have a different time preference to someone that isn’t?

Time preferences can clearly be influenced by public policy. Hyperinflation, for example, would give people a powerful incentive to spend, rather than save. Some research has suggested that exposure to communism had impacted the time preferences of East Germans, compared to those who lived in West Germany (albeit that the effect is wearing off and Germans overall have some of the lowest time preferences in the world.)

When considering some of America’s deep-rooted, inter-generational socio-economic challenges, we ought perhaps to think a little more about time preferences. Here’s a heretical thought; how might time preferences vary across the country?

What can we do to lower time preferences? Can one actually lower time preferences, or is it perhaps a case of not raising them?

Idealists believe that if only we adopted the right policies, we would get better outcomes and prosper. A conservative idealist should recognize that there are some aspects of human nature that we can neither change nor perfect. Time preferences might be one of them.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.

How about we start protecting our forgotten rights: Robbing a bank is a crime everywhere. But in some places and times you could become a criminal just by growing vegetables, feeding the homeless, playing poker or working without a government-mandated license.

African immigrant Tedy Okech risked arrest when she started working as a hair braider. She learned the craft in her youth by practicing on her mother and sisters. When she settled in Idaho in 2005, she found neighbors willing to pay for her skills. Soon she had a thriving side gig, which supplemented her income as a part-time insurance agent.

Everyone was happy except the cosmetology police, who mandated she take hundreds of hours of school and earn an occupational license. Rather than comply, Okech filed a constitutional lawsuit, prompting Idaho lawmakers to pass licensing reforms in 2022. My public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represented her.

The case highlights the importance of unenumerated rights — the ones not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. A complete list of things people may do without government permission would fill volumes. Even then, certain rights might slip through the cracks, such as the right to braid hair.

Rather than risk omissions, the framers added the Ninth Amendment to the Bill of Rights as an etcetera clause, saving gallons of ink. Using simple language, it expands the Constitution to guarantee not just enumerated rights, but “others retained by the people.” Words with similar effect, but applied to the states, were then added after the Civil War, protecting Americans’ “privileges or immunities.”

Okech should have been safe, but two problems have emerged since these amendments. First, judges and legal scholars have found ways to explain them away. Mostly they just ignore them. The Supreme Court has yet to cite the Ninth Amendment as the primary basis for a single opinion.

Second, policymakers discovered they could skirt the Constitution with little pushback from the courts, especially when it comes to unenumerated rights — which too often get second-tier status. Results over the decades have ranged from bizarre edicts, such as rules against ice cream on cherry pies in Kansas, to serious privacy invasions, such as prohibitions on private school attendance in Oregon.

The legislative overreach has continued in modern times. Miami Shores, Florida, prosecuted Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll in 2013 for growing vegetables in their front yard. Bullhead City, Arizona, arrested Norma Thornton for feeding the homeless at a public park in 2022. And Oklahoma criminalized tattooing from 1963 to 2006.

Many jurisdictions also restrict poker, home-baked cookie sales and educational choice. New York parents violate the law if they homeschool their children without submitting annual instruction plans and quarterly reports to the state by mandated deadlines.

Meanwhile, 17 states continue to license hair braiders. Montana was on the list until April 21, 2023, when Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a bill following Idaho’s example.

States routinely infringe on unenumerated rights. Lawmakers meet, debate and vote, giving the appearance of legitimacy to their actions. Citing the Ninth Amendment does not help when code enforcers accuse you of breaking the law—a real occurrence for hair braiders and others.

My new book, “Baby Ninth Amendments,” explores a second line of defense. State constitutions, which can expand federal guarantees of individual rights, often contain Ninth Amendment variations. These clauses, informally called “Baby Ninths,” can help rein in policymakers when they restrict safe and common activities without providing compelling reasons.

Courts typically avoid giving these Baby Ninths their due. The implications are too great. As one Iowa Supreme Court justice hysterically noted in 1869, the result would be an “unwritten Constitution” protecting all the absolute rights of the people.

Courts prefer to pick and choose when recognizing unenumerated rights. So, they make up distinctions without differences, which usually boil down to “I like these rights and not those.” Then they apply various standards of review, which they can calibrate to get desired results.

If nothing else, courts are creative. But instead of exercising the mental gymnastics necessary to protect only the unenumerated rights they like, state judges simply could activate their Baby Ninths, which are well-disposed to protect all unenumerated rights.

Judges might resist such bold action, but this is not their choice to make. People often decry judges seizing power and legislating from the bench, yet the reverse scenario is far more common: Judges shrinking from their responsibility to apply constitutional commands.

This is what happens when courts ignore a Baby Ninth — they abdicate a responsibility the people have placed in their hands. Bank robbers deserve punishment, not hair braiders.

Anthony Sanders is the author of “Baby Ninth Amendments” (University of Michigan Press, 2023). He is a senior attorney and director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice in West Lakeland, Minnesota.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.