America is failing . . . the marshmallow test.

In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman revisits the famous 1972 Stanford experiments in which psychologists hypothesized that children who successfully resisted eating a marshmallow (on the promise that if they waited a bit, they would receive two marshmallows) would be more successful later in life. Krugman acknowledges that the experiments have been largely discredited but, nonetheless, he insists that they are a useful analogy for America’s apparent inability to delay gratification during the coronavirus pandemic.

Krugman contends that we have a workable two-step plan for beating the virus: “Impose strict social distancing long enough to reduce the number of infected people to a small fraction of the population,” and then “implement a regime of testing, tracing, and isolating: quickly identifying any new outbreak, finding everyone exposed and quarantining them until the danger is past.”