The background and importance of ‘delayed gratification’, the signature phrase in the Economic Survey 2025-26

The test, credited to American psychologist Walter Mischel, was simple. Cohorts of four-year-olds at a pre-school on the sunny Stanford campus in California were given a marshmallow and two choices: they could have it immediately. Or, if a child waited for 15 minutes, she or he would get two marshmallows. The message: small reward now, bigger reward later.

The kids who were able to hold off for “delayed gratification" not only got more marshmallows, but when Mischel and his team of researchers revisited them as teenagers and young adults, they were significantly ahead of peers on parameters such as self-assuredness, scholastic scores, social competence, self-worth, and other personality vectors. Those who settled for one marshmallow lagged had higher chances of aggressive behaviour and other conduct disorders.

Delayed gratification was a dominant theme in Thursday's Economic Survey. Madurai-born Nageswaran opened the theme with Yama's message in the Katha Upanishad: “Every moment asks us to choose between Śreya, the enduring good, and Preya, the fleeting comfort. The mature mind chooses Śreya; the immature mind settles for Preya. In other words, the country stands to gain immensely when all of us embrace delayed gratification."

The Survey, a document that signposts the state of the economy between two fiscal years, referred to the phrase nine times—to drive home the point how working hard with a long window is what delivers good outcomes. Whether it is for a four-year-old or a near-$4 trillion economy.

“Another recurring but underappreciated constraint on India’s development trajectory is the difficulty of sustaining delayed gratification. Competing in the global big league, whether in manufacturing, logistics, institutions, or elite sports, requires incurring near-term costs for returns that are uncertain, delayed, and often invisible in the short term," the Survey elaborated contrasting delayed gratification and the cost of impatience.

Nageswaran and team then called out how hard work and working smart are complementary and not divergent.

“A common misunderstanding is to treat ‘working smart’ as the opposite of ‘working hard’. In practice, working smart is the result of working hard over time. Shortcuts are not discovered first and applied later; they are earned only after long exposure to detail, repetition, and error. One has to put in the hours before one can see which steps can be skipped," wrote Nageswaran with characteristic pithiness.

The full complexity of a task needs to be learnt before knowing which details truly matter and one has to make mistakes many times before discovering how to do it right, the Survey spelt out before concluding: “Delayed gratification is therefore not a moral virtue, but a productive capability."

The perils of short-termism and its attendant risks to societal and economic structures were also spotlighted in the Survey. “While enforcement and testing matter, the deeper issue is behavioural. When delayed gratification breaks down, systems become vulnerable to shortcuts that deliver short-term results at the expense of long-term credibility. Trust and legitimacy collapse far faster than they can be rebuilt."

For solid economic outcomes, Nageswaran posited that “millions of small actions [have to] align predictably over long periods" with systems and actors working in lock step. “This alignment cannot be legislated into existence. It depends on citizens and organisations accepting delayed gratification as an economic necessity rather than a personal sacrifice."

The fingerprints of Nageswaran, a columnist for Mint since the newspaper's early years, were evident in the survey document: “Where impatience dominates, hysteresis sets in: skills decay, institutions forget how to do the hard work, and the cost of rebuilding capability rises sharply."

The use of ‘hysteresis’, a word with roots in physics that predicts how strongly a system is interlinked with its history or past choices, is interesting.

Why? Because it tells everyone how difficult it will be for India to shake off its “chalta hein" attitude while pushing itself towards “delayed gratification". ('Chalta hein' is a Hindi phrase that loosely translates into “this is what it is, let it be".)