You Can Lead a Horse to Banking

(But You Can't Make It Save)

Do you feel the need to apologize if you’re late for lunch? Or does it annoy you more when someone nags about a missed deadline? There isn’t a single “correct” answer. Attitudes toward time differ from country to country, and even among peoples living side by side. These mental habits appear daily in choices between punctuality and pleasure, reflecting tendencies that run deeper than just upbringing or environment.

Conservatives canceled the Smithsonian Black History Museum in 2020 for ascribing future-oriented thinking and time discipline to “White culture.” They did not dispute the facts of the Black-White gap in this area, but tut-tutted at the implication. Empirically, time perspective predicts behaviors they warn against: hedonistic live-for-today types drive dangerously, abuse more drugs, and live more unplanned lives.¹

This maligned graphic came from a 1978 book on anti-racism training.

An unspoken fear blocking discussion here is that genetics loads the gun and pulls the trigger. If punctuality is crucial to a good life, if being on time is “White culture,” and if twelve generations haven’t broadly spread these traits among the underclass, is the future hopeless? Fatalism is itself an unproductive attitude toward time. And denying genuine, persistent differences makes it harder to design effective, lasting solutions.

On an individual level, it’s easier to be practical about this. An entire product category, including Fitbit and Oura Ring, appeals to neurotics who wish to track their sleep patterns. Consumer genomics companies predict night-owl tendencies alongside ancestral migrations. That one’s underlying circadian rhythm may be fixed at birth is just the starting point for shaping lifestyles, workplaces, and societies.

All Kinds of Clocks in the Cuckoo’s Nest

One of the genes that influences chronotype, or whether a person hits peak energy earlier or later in the day, is PER3. The evening-oriented 4-repeat mutation shows wide population differences and is most common in East Asia.² Chronic sleep deprivation is widespread in the urban, developed areas of this region due to the mismatch between body clocks and early school and work demands.

Besides sleep pressure, another biological factor shaping time perception is dopamine clearance. A mutation in the DRD4 gene, called “The Explorer’s Gene” in pop science, reduces tolerance for routine tasks and promotes novelty-seeking behaviors. Its global distribution is roughly opposite to PER3, being least common in East Asians.³ Frustration with drudgery may be treated as ADHD, though many value this trait.

Your ancestors built paddies. Your brain wants to scroll TikTok at midnight.

Completing our molecular trinity is the COMT gene, which subtly shapes time management strategies. Its “Warrior” and “Worrier” variants influence dopamine regulation in the prefrontal cortex: fast-clearing Warriors concentrate better under stress, while slow-clearing Worriers excel at working-memory tasks under calmer conditions. The Worrier variant is most common among Europeans.⁴

Each of these three dials on the brain’s time-keeping system is adaptive in different contexts. The rhythm dial (PER3) adjusts to support daytime productivity or nighttime vigilance. The novelty dial (DRD4) produces explorers and exploiters, and the focus dial (COMT) favors front-line performance or back-room concentration. No setting is universally optimal, so none have disappeared through evolution.

GINA’s Got a Gun

Individuals and groups can deny their biological chronotypes, fueling social jetlag and mental health problems.⁵ A better policy is to embrace them as natural comparative advantages. Chronobiological diversity only becomes a problem if any Dear Leader insists everyone make shoes or write software for the good of the nation, rather than using immigration and flexible labor markets to match people to suitable schedules.

Some forward-thinking workplaces have experimented with assigning tasks around employees’ internal clocks, reporting gains in productivity and well-being.⁶ Yet genetic nondiscrimination rules, such as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) in the U.S. and the GDPR in the EU, restrict employers from using DNA data, forcing them to rely on easily gamed proxies like chronotype questionnaires.

A parallel dynamic produced a de-facto ban on employer IQ testing following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power, triggered by Black–White gaps in cognitive test scores. The U.S. Congress passed GINA in 2008 for similarly race-specific reasons, its bogeyman sickle-cell screening aimed at African Americans.⁷ It acknowledges genetic differences enough to fear them, but pretends they don’t exist.

To the extent policy is judged mainly by safety for one ethnic group, breakthroughs will happen elsewhere. Though racial politics may seem calmer in June 2025, just five years ago three major U.S. tech firms simultaneously withdrew from facial-recognition markets over exactly these concerns. IBM exited permanently, Microsoft stopped police sales indefinitely, and Amazon imposed a one-year moratorium.⁸

Money Can’t Buy Patience

In the Soviet Union, planners tried to create a New Soviet Man by moving people around and mixing groups together. American technocrats prefer gentler “nudges,” changing incentives to drive desired behaviors. But making banking easier doesn’t turn spenders into savers. Locking cookies away doesn’t cure a sweet tooth. And higher interest rates can’t change how people fundamentally value their time.

Treating “wealth gaps,” “health gaps,” and other unequal outcomes as inherently suspicious relies on oversimplified assumptions. For example, the “universal pre-K” fad in the 2010s assumed disparities arose from childhood deprivation. Yet even when these programs improved academic skills, children’s willingness to delay gratification remained stratified by race, suggesting more fundamental sources of difference.⁹

An influential cross-cultural analysis challenges the idea that willingness to wait, which ranged from 89% in Germany to 8% in Nigeria, depends mostly on economic development. Hofstede dimensions, particularly individualism (valuing autonomy), long-term orientation (planning ahead), and uncertainty avoidance (comfort with ambiguity), predict patience more robustly than GDP, inflation, age, or education.¹⁰

At the group level, patience predicts meaningful societal outcomes independent of wealth: higher R&D investment, better-developed research infrastructure, stricter environmental policies, stronger sovereign credit, and lower obesity rates. But these reflect the values of cautious savers, not of all humanity. For some, a plump wife isn’t a curse but a prize: rather than rushing to “save” people from themselves, let’s wait.

1. For example, Philip Zimbardo’s 1997 study “Present Time Perspective as a Predictor of Risky Driving” found that “living in the moment” predicted risky behavior even after accounting for other known risk factors like sensation-seeking and impulsivity. Zimbardo showed that time perspective is measurable, consequential, and captures something different (than nine related factors like aggression) about how people make decisions.

2. Nadkarni, Nachiket A., et al. “Evolution of a Length Polymorphism in the Human PER3 Gene, a Component of the Circadian System.” Journal of Biological Rhythms, vol. 20, no. 6, Dec. 2005. PER3-4R frequencies varied dramatically across populations: 19% in Papua New Guinea, 48% among Amharic Ethiopians, 65% in South African Bantus, 69% in Ukrainians, and 89% in Mongolia.

3. Chang, Fong-Ming, et al. “The World-Wide Distribution of Allele Frequencies at the Human Dopamine D4 Receptor Locus.” Human Genetics, vol. 98, no. 1, Aug. 1996. The DRD4 7-repeat allele shows a clear geographic cline: highest in Native American populations (especially South Americans, 45-78%), moderate in Europeans and Africans (6-21%), and rare to absent in East Asians (0-4%).

4. Palmatier, Meg A., et al. “Global Variation in the Frequencies of Functionally Different Catechol-O-Methyltransferase Alleles.” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 46, no. 4, 1999. The COMT low-activity (“worrier”) allele’s pattern is: highest in Europeans (33-62%), variable in Africans (7-38%) and Native Americans (16-55%), and uniformly rare in East Asians (15-31%).

5. See Knutson, Kristen L., and Malcolm von Schantz. “Associations between Chronotype, Morbidity and Mortality in the UK Biobank Cohort.” Chronobiology International, vol. 35, no. 8, 2018. Among over 400,000 participants, those identifying as “definite evening types” showed 10% higher all-cause mortality over 6.5 years compared to morning types, with higher rates of psychological disorders, diabetes, and neurological conditions.

6. A five-month chronotype-adjusted schedule at a German steel plant gave the earliest and latest quartile about 24–30 minutes more work-day sleep and cut overall social jetlag by roughly one hour. Céline Vetter, Dorothee Fischer, Joana L. Matera, and Till Roenneberg, “Aligning Work and Circadian Time in Shift Workers Improves Sleep and Reduces Circadian Disruption,” Current Biology 25, no. 7 (2015): 907–11.

7. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-233, § 2(3), 122 Stat. 881 (2008), U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): “Because some genetic traits are most prevalent in particular groups, members of a particular group may be stigmatized or discriminated against as a result of that genetic information. This form of discrimination was evident in the 1970s, which saw the advent of programs to screen and identify carriers of sickle cell anemia, a disease which afflicts African-Americans.”

8. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wrote to Congress announcing permanent exit: “IBM firmly opposes... uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology... for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights.” Microsoft President Brad Smith declared: “We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place.” Amazon imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition, its AI-powered facial recognition software.

9. Andreoni, James, et al. “Toward an Understanding of the Development of Time Preferences: Evidence from Field Experiments.” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 25590, National Bureau of Economic Research, Feb. 2019. The study found Black children were 8-14 percentage points more likely to always choose immediate rewards compared to Hispanic children, a disparity that persists even when controlling for socioeconomic status, cognitive skills, and executive function. Parents of Black children also showed higher impatience rates (suggesting the pattern continues into adulthood) but no significant correlation was found between parents’ and children’s time preferences, indicating these disparities don’t arise through simple cultural transmission from parent to child.

10. Wang, Mei, Marc Oliver Rieger, and Thorsten Hens. “How Time Preferences Differ: Evidence from 53 Countries.” Journal of Economic Psychology, vol. 52, 2016. This study examined intertemporal choices among 6,912 university students across 53 countries, measuring patience through decisions between immediate and delayed payments. Patience levels varied significantly by region: Germanic and Nordic countries (85–89% willing to wait) ranked highest, followed by Anglo-American (68%), Asian (66%), and Latin American countries (48%). African countries exhibited the lowest patience levels at an average of 33%.