At high noon last October 1st, the citizens of Ecuador did something they’d never dreamed possible: they synchronized their watches. In doing so, they embarked on a Campaña Contra la Impuntualidad, a national crusade against lateness. A group called Participacíon Ciudadana had orchestrated the initiative in order to combat Ecuadorans’ notoriously cavalier attitude toward time. The group enlisted the country’s only Olympic gold medallist, the race-walker Jefferson Pérez, as a spokesman, plastered cities and villages with posters (“Inject yourself each morning with a dose of responsibility, respect, and discipline”), and persuaded companies to bar tardy workers from meetings. Even President Lucio Gutiérrez, infamously unpunctual, vowed to participate. His spokesman, going on television to announce this vow, arrived at the studio, needless to say, several minutes late.
Such a campaign may seem farcical—no more critical to a country’s national interest than a crusade against poor spelling or bad breath—but it arose out of a basic economic fact: punctuality pays. According to one study, chronic lateness costs Ecuador $2.5 billion a year—hardly small change in a country with a gross domestic product of just twenty-four billion dollars. The fundamental challenge for a modern economy is to coördinate the actions of millions of independent people so that goods may be produced and services delivered as efficiently as possible. It’s a lot easier to do this when people are where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there. This is especially true in light of recent innovations such as just-in-time manufacturing. Dell computer’s suppliers have to be able to deliver parts to Dell’s factories within ninety minutes. Under those conditions, “I’ll get to it later” won’t do.
The social psychologist Robert Levine, who has devoted decades to studying people’s ideas about time, suggests that cultures can be divided into those which live on “event time,” where events are allowed to dictate people’s schedules, and those which live on “clock time,” where people’s schedules dictate events. Unsurprisingly, countries that live on clock time are more successful economically—if perhaps less fun at night—than those which do not. In part, that’s because attitudes toward time tend to pervade nearly every aspect of a culture. In hyper-punctual countries like Japan, pedestrians walk fast, business transactions take place quickly, and bank clocks are always accurate. In less punctual places, such as Indonesia, pedestrians amble, workers dawdle, and bank clocks are usually wrong. In other words, Ecuadorans, who have been living on event time—known locally as Ecuadoran time—are trying to revolutionize the way they live and work.
Can they do it? There are obvious obstacles. Dawdling can be quite pleasant, especially when it’s what you’re accustomed to. There is also the tricky question of class. Lateness can be a way for the rich and powerful to assert themselves, to show how much more valuable their time is. In Ecuador, members of the military and the government are the most notorious offenders, and businessmen are far more likely to show up late than bluecollar workers are. And, as the economists Kaushik Basu and Jorgen Weibull have pointed out, in a country where everyone is always late, it becomes rational to be late. There’s no point in getting to a meeting on time if no one is going to be there. Tardiness feeds on itself, creating a vicious cycle of mañana, mañana.
What Ecuador really has to overcome is the idea that culture is destiny, that showing up late is just what Ecuadorans do. In the past two decades, great attention has been paid to the economic significance of cultural predispositions—to the role, for example, of trust and risk-aversion in the old Soviet-bloc countries’ fitful attempts to adapt to capitalism. Culture, we have discovered, matters more than many bondholders wish it did. But it is not immutable. In Western Europe and the United States, people once had to learn to become punctual, too. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, factory owners applied enormous effort (and plenty of coercion) just to get workers to show up on the right day, let alone at the right hour. The historian E. P. Thompson chronicled how the rise of the factory in Great Britain profoundly altered people’s notion of time, from one based on the calendar to one based on the clock. The shift from piece-rate work (where you were paid for what you produced) to hourly wages (where you were paid for how long you worked) also helped, as did the standardization of time zones, in the late nineteenth century.
By comparison, the people of Ecuador have it easy; they already have clocks, time zones, and hourly wages. All they need now is a kick in the pants. If you persuade enough people to be on time, it becomes rational for everyone else to be on time, too. The more people there are who are punctual, the greater the benefits of punctuality. That’s why a national campaign, silly as it may seem, makes some sense. It’s a call to shame, a nationwide tapping of the watch.
Maybe someday Ecuador will be welcomed into the community of punctual nations. And that might lead an observer with a sanguine cast of mind to wonder whether similar efforts might help wipe out other corrosive cultural tendencies around the world, like corruption. We are constantly being told, about social norms in places like the Middle East, “That’s just the way it is.” Perhaps. But by taking on tardiness Ecuador’s citizens are telling us something else: culture is what you do, not who you are. It’s about time, too.
