You are NOT "Sorry I'm Late"!!

We tell a story about German academic quarter hours-- akademische Viertel--  and use it to argue that lateness is an economics problem of coordination, incentives, and transaction costs, not just manners. We lay out five rules that predict who shows up late, why the pattern spreads, and how to spot it before you commit to a recurring meeting.
• the “academic quarter hour” as a rule that makes lateness predictable
• lateness as a transaction cost that blocks group goals
• platonic travelers and the habit of leaving no buffer
• five rules of lateness and what each predicts
• why meetings drift into equilibrium lateness over time
• lateness as an externality and prisoner’s dilemma
• incentive fixes from social sanctions to financial penalties
• watch setting quirks and backwards induction as a practical test
• listener letter on medical insurance hiding prices from consumers
• why hospitals were small before 1935 and how sulfa drugs changed that
• letter on permitting payments for solar projects and why people call them bribes
• book recommendation for the punctually challenged

Links:

• Munger, Chron of Higher Ed, 5 Rules of Lateness in Academe 
• Munger, Econlib, The 5 Sorry Rules of Lateness
• New York Times article on "Time Personality"
• U of Michigan's version of the academic quarter hour
  
  

Book-o-da-week:  Never Be Late Again: 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged
by Diana DeLonzor and Gerry DeLonzor.  Post Madison Publishing    May 19, 2026.

If you have questions or comments, or want to suggest a future topic, email the show at taitc.email@gmail.com !

You can follow Mike Munger on Twitter at @mungowitz 

Transcript

German Classes And The Hidden Fifteen

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Mike Munger, the knower of important things, from Duke University. A few years back I taught some graduate classes at a German university, Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. I'd assumed, like everyone assumes, that the German reputation for punctuality would carry into the classroom out of respect for the professor, whether the professor deserves respect or not, of course. On the first day, every single student walked into my eighteen, that meaning six PM class late. They were late the second day. They were late the third day. By the third day I was mildly annoyed, so I announced that from then on I'd start at eighteen ten, because apparently that's when everybody felt like they could arrive. So a kid in the front row raised his hand. So you mean we'll start at eighteen twenty five? Well, I was just confused. Turns out that the Germans have a name for this Das Akademische Viertel Academic Quarter Hour. So unless a class time is marked ST, meaning Cina tempore without extra time, the default is CITE CT CUM Tempore, which means fifteen minutes are simply added silently by convention. Everybody knows this. A six o'clock PM class starts at six fifteen PM. Everybody knows it. Nobody says it. It's amazing. Leave it to the Germans to figure out how to be late exactly on

Lateness As A Transaction Cost

SPEAKER_00 1:25

time. Well this week, being late and being on time, it's a transaction cost problem. If a group of us are going to meet somewhere to do something, deciding on where and when is crucial. Failing to make that agreement can prevent the group from achieving its goal, just like any transaction cost. Well, no one intentionally goes to the wrong place. Coordination on location seems to work pretty well. But then why do so many people, so many people, intentionally go at the wrong time? Wear people late on purpose. Straight out of Creedmore, this is Tidy C.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

I thought they talk about a system where there were no transaction costs.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

When it is costly to transact, institutions matter, and it is costly to transact.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Platonic travelers. There's always some reason they're late this time, and they're always amazed, what are the chances of that happening? Well, that's not the right question, Pumpkin. The right question is, what are the chances of something happening when you don't leave enough time to get there on time? Now, a common one that drives me crazy is well I didn't know where I was going. I always ask, did you know that? Did you know you didn't know where you were going? Because you can leave earlier. Ah, but not for the platonic traveler because they travel in the world of forms. There are no problems in the world of forms. Now, I have a character flaw. I always forget meetings. I try to put them on my calendar so I don't always. I certainly do miss meetings and it's embarrassing. But I'm almost never late. Knowing that other people have said they find me intimidating, even rude. They'll say that it is rude to expect the other person to show up on time. Now think about that. I expect you, if I asked you when should we meet, and you say a time. I expect you not to be a seven-year-old. I expect you to have enough responsibility to show up at the time that you picked, that you told me to be at. Why is it that you are unable to keep your word, but you expect me to keep mine? It's because you are mentally a seven-year-old. Now people say they're busy. That's not true. They're narcissists. Busy people are almost never late, and if they are, they will tell you, they'll send you a text, I'm running late, and they'll do it an hour before, not ten minutes after they were supposed to be there. I already know you're late. It's basic economics, folks. If a resource is scarce, skilled people economize on that resource. Busy people, in fact, are almost always exactly on time because they develop skills of time management. Late people like to think they're busy, and they subconsciously make a point of being late so that they can show you how important they are. In fact, they're just losers. There's an article in the New York Times in 2025 about time personalities. I'll put up a link to it in show notes. And some people just find the fact that they have made a commitment to be so upsetting that they rebel against their own promise just in order to be late on purpose. I'll show me. Well, because I have spent so much time waiting for loser narcissists to show up because they're always late, I've had plenty of time to think about rules. That is not uh legislation, but the empirical patterns of lateness. So I've written this in a couple of places, and I call it the five rules of

The Five Rules Of Lateness

SPEAKER_00 5:15

lateness. Let's go through them because they hold up and I think you'll recognize them. Rule one, the busier the person, the less likely they are to be late. Now that one runs against your intuition. We assume busy people are the ones sprinting around apologizing. Actual busy people, though, manage the time carefully precisely because their time is valuable. The same way you manage anything valuable. Early on in this podcast, we talk about the fact that we measure lettuce by the head, but we measure diamonds in carats because they're more valuable. Busy is just a signal that time has become the scarce resource. Scarce resources get measured precisely. Incompetent people, by contrast, just believe they're busy because they're so lousy at managing their time. All they are is lazy and inefficient. Lateness is the visible symptom of an invisible disorganization in your life and an unwillingness to carry out your promises. Now there is a caveat, and it's a real one. Truly busy people, CEOs, senators, provosts, they do run late. Usually because they got delayed because someone else was late for a meeting with them. Lateness cascades. It's contagious across a whole day's schedule. Rule two closeness hurts. The closer your office is to the meeting room, the later you tend to arrive. Now, you may not have noticed this, but you'll notice it from now on, I promise you. If you're flying in from another city, the meeting is mentally elevated in importance. So you show up on time. If it's just down the hall, you try to squeeze in one more phone call, one more paragraph of grading, and you come in five minutes late saying I was I was on a call. Uh that doesn't excuse anything. That's just you chose to do this. You were just down the hall. You could have been on time. What you're saying is I didn't care enough about you to be on time because I'm really close. Rule three the first will be last. This one can produce a Molière comedic farce set piece. Somebody arrives two minutes early, they put their folder down on the table as a kind of totem. I was here, and then they wander off to the coffee pot to chat with staff or someone else. They come back ten minutes late, but their folder was there the whole time, a kind of mute proxy. Well, I was here. So someone comes in, oh Smith's not here, I'll grab a soda. Smith comes back. Now Umbutu is going to get a book. No one's actually late by more than a few minutes individually, and yet the meeting doesn't start for 20 minutes. Rule four if you've never missed a plane, you're spending too much time in airports. Now that's a genuine economic point. It's not just a quip. Um I happen to disagree with that, but I want to bring it up. Missing a flight is what economists would call a sharp discontinuous penalty. The cost function jumps enormously right at the deadline, so it's rational to build in a large buffer for flights. Meetings don't work that way though. Cost of being a little bit late to a meeting rises smoothly, not in a cliff. So if you've never even been a few minutes late to a meeting, you're probably overinvesting in punctuality relative to the actual cost structure. There is a random distribution. Sometimes things happen that you didn't expect and couldn't have foreseen. That is, instead of a little bit of traffic, there was a lot of traffic and there was a wreck, you got delayed by 20 minutes. So occasionally being late to a meeting is fine as long as you're also at least equally likely to be early to those meetings. Rule five, if you've never been early, that's not an accident. That means you're a platonic traveler. So if you've never been late, that maybe that means that you're spending too much time waiting. But if you've never been early, then everybody hates you. They hate you. Genuine randomness would make you early sometimes and late sometimes. And this is the clever part. True error should be negatively correlated over time. So if you're late this week, human nature should nudge you to overcorrect and arrive early next week because you know otherwise people will start to hate you. But Adam Smith's impartial spectator can be defeated by your solipsism. Chronic late arrivers are always late. They never update. They're late for a different specific reason every time. Traffic, a phone call, lost folder. They didn't they couldn't find a place to park. Their dog ran away. Because the excuses vary, they convince themselves there's no pattern, but there is a pattern. You're always late, and you always have an excuse. It's the very variety of excuses that proves the bias. If the reasons are always different, the reasons are no reasons at all. If you wanted to be on time, you'd leave early enough to allow for the unexpected. Instead, you're late and then waste time telling you they're dumb reasons why life happens. Something's going to happen. There's going to be a school bus, you're not going to find a parking space, your dog is going to get out, you have to leave an extra five or ten minutes. Sometimes that means you're early. That actually is good, because if you're not early sometimes, you're not leaving early enough. So,

Why Chronic Lateness Becomes Normal

SPEAKER_00 10:38

why this is an equilibrium and not just a character flaw, though it is a character flaw. So the actual economics is worth being precise about. Some people are just rude, is not an explanation. So let's start with what people actually want. Everybody would like two things. They want to arrive exactly on time so there's no reputational hit, and they want to be the last one to walk in so they don't have to sit around waiting. Now, unless the entire room arrives at exactly the same time, you can't have both. So everyone arrives roughly on time is technically a stable outcome. Economists would call it an equilibrium, but it's fragile. If even one person is occasionally late, everybody else knows that we're not going to start on time. So the next meeting, people build in a small buffer of lateness on their own, just in case. That buffet buffer becomes habit, habit becomes norm, and once ten minutes late carries no real penalty, plenty of people will use it to buy themselves ten fewer minutes of waiting around. And some people will do it constantly. Now, that means that we know that the meeting starts ten minutes after the schedule, and that means that some people start arriving late even by that standard. This is structurally the same problem as noise in a crowded restaurant. Everyone would benefit if everyone spoke a little more quietly. But I'm selfish. I value my conversation at my table more than I value the ambient noise level at the next table over so that you can hear yourself speak. I speak loud enough to be heard over the din, and so does everyone else, and the whole room ends up louder than anyone actually wants. Lateness works the same way. Chronically late people pay a small reputational cost, but they weigh their own dislike of waiting more heavily than they weigh other people's time. It's a classic externality and prisoner's dilemma. No one optimizes for the room. Everyone optimizes for themselves. And it's an equilibrium problem because individual scolding doesn't fix it. You need to change the incentive structure. Now, the Germans did this with their akademische Wirtel. They just legislated the equilibrium lateness into the schedule itself and called it CT. And if you're later than that, there actually are social sanctions. People will give you the evil eye. Other organizations do it with fines. Football teams, baseball teams famously levy real financial penalties for showing up even one minute late to practice. Baseball's old kangaroo courts imposed fines, public ridicule on chronic offenders. Academic departments I've suggested the use of a broadsword, I couldn't get that past the administration, but we can resort to pettier offenses. What happens to someone who's always late? Well, you get assigned to chair the committee on letterhead compliance or the library card color scheme. Every culture that's ever run a meeting has produced something clever enough to write a line about lateness.

Externalities Incentives And Social Sanctions

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Few of those are worth getting exactly right because a lot of the quotes about punctuality floating around are either garbled or just invented, so I checked these against actual sources as a way of making sure that they're real. Louis XIV of France supposedly said in an eighteen forty four memoir, punctuality is the politeness of kings. Now, whether he actually said that I don't know, but that it was an understanding that showing up on time was respectful to the other people. Then Oscar Wilde has a line from a play, The Importance of Being Earnest One character is described this way. He was always late on principle. His principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. Well, it's the thief of your time. Being late is a thief for everyone else. So it's Wilde doing what Wilde always does, taking a Victorian virtue and flipping it over to see the joke underneath. It's structurally the exact opposite claim from Louis XIV, and it's also correct in a sense, it's just the other side of the equilibrium. The side of the person who doesn't want to overpay for a virtue that no one's pricing correctly. And then Evelyn Waugh in Put Out More Flags said Punctuality is the virtue of the board. So that's compresses my rule number one into an epigram. If you have nothing better to do, of course you're early. The busy, the interesting people, well, they're all somewhere else because they're spending that last minute. It's actually not true, Evelyn. What they're doing is waiting until they're late so that they can make a dramatic entrance and then waste even more of your time by telling you their cockamy excuse for why they were late, which you do not want to hear. So if you put those three next to each other, you have the whole debate. Punctuality is respect for others, punctuality as theft from the self, punctuality as a symptom of being boring and having nothing to do. All three of them are have some elements of I think respect from at least parts of the population. Well, one more thing, and it's the closest thing I have to practical advice, other than backwards induce and leave enough time so that on average you will be not late. Before you schedule a recurring meeting with someone, just take a look at their watch if you can. Now, not everybody wears a watch and a lot of people use cell phones, but if the person still uses a watch, you're likely to find that they set their watch ahead. Chronically late people disproportionately set their clocks a few minutes fast, and then they discount their own fast clock mentally, so they still walk in late. Makes no logical spent uh sense. It's like deliberately misspelling a word in your spell checker so you can catch it later. But people do it, and then they tell you with a I've had people tell me, well, uh I'm only ten minutes late, not twenty, like my watch said. I didn't ask what your watch said. I'm a little interested that you're incapable of setting your watch accurately. Um I never said you shot your dog. Why are you ten minutes late? The the the what

Quotes About Punctuality And Respect

SPEAKER_00 17:00

how you set your watch is beside the point. If you set your watch ahead, you are a narcissist. You're always late. Set your watch to the correct time and backwards induce. So, lateness isn't really a character issue, or at least it's not only a character issue. It's a coordination game with a fragile equilibrium, real distributional stakes, your time against mine, and a genuinely useful diagnostic. Watch how someone manages their calendar. You'll learn more about their actual competence than most resumes will tell you. So if you have a problem with time, you should cultivate punctuality because other people will judge you by it. It's like a brown MM. Well, I'll leave you with a line I've used to close the pieces that I wrote on uh lateness, and that is that it's like Eric Siegel's love story. Being on time means never having to say you're star sorry. And in fact, even if you are always late and say you're sorry, you're not sorry. You just honestly think your time is more important than other people's time, and you enjoy being the center of attention. In other words, you're a bad person. You are anything but sorry. Except, of course, that doesn't stop anyone from saying it anyway. Whoa, that sound means it's time for the twedge. Instead of a formal twedge, I have uh a number of observations. One of my favorite was uh was at a meeting with some department chairs and a dean, and the person who had scheduled the meeting was one of the department chairs, and uh she was always late. We all came to the meeting, including the dean, and the person who had scheduled the meeting walked in almost ten minutes late, and the dean said, Well, what's wrong? Why are you late? And the the person said, kind of drew herself up. I didn't expect to be admonished. And the dean said, I didn't expect you to be late. If you were gonna be late, why didn't you tell us all to come 10 minutes late?

SPEAKER_01 19:05

What do you want for nothing?

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Some other things that I've heard uh from faculty. I'm not late, I'm time adjacent. My watch runs on maybe punctuality called, but I let it go to voicemail. I took the scenic route through time. I move at the speed of eventually. Now, I guess in a good way, all of those people are honest. They just think you don't deserve not to have your time wasted, and they want to make sure that their time is not wasted at all costs. So you suck and they're awesome.

How Health Insurance Hides Prices

SPEAKER_00 19:55

At two letters this week,

Fast Watches And Practical Diagnostics

SPEAKER_00 19:57

one from WEH, who commented on the Medical Stars podcast. Most excellent podcast. Two items you might find interesting. One regards medical insurance and the other the pre-1935 hospital size. First, roughly speaking, in 1960, 7% of all medical bills were paid by medical insurance, with the remaining 93% paid in cash. Today it's exactly the opposite. 7% paid by cash, 93% paid by insurance. In nineteen sixty, the patient consumer was aware of price. Today, the consumer is completely unaware of the price. The process today is basically like entering your favorite big box store. All the items for sale have no price indicated. Imagine going into a big box store. If you have to pay for it and there's no prices, you'd like to leave. But suppose that you're not going to pay. You don't actually care what the prices are. In the medical care medical insurance, you've entered and you stay in the big box store with no price, you go shopping, you pick up several items from different aisles, thinking you might want them. You check out the items at the cashier, but no prices ever appear on the cash register. At the end of the month, you get your bill in the form of a monthly health insurance premium, and you're surprised at how high the price of your monthly premium is. Because you're thinking you think that everyone else is paying for your health care. Yeah, but you're also paying for theirs. And since there's no prices on any of these things, they're all jacked up. Second, WEH helped John Cochrane, who was then at the Booth School at the University of Chicago, do research for his essay on uh medicine and insurance after the

Twedge One Liners And A Dean’s Rebuke

SPEAKER_00 21:42

ACA. During the research, he kept running into pictures of hospitals prior to the mid 1930s. Pictures are always of a hospital about the size of a mid sized mansion with the entire staff on the lawn in front of the mansion for a staff. Loto, the whole staff, all twenty of them. Why were hospitals so small with small staffs in comparison to today's gargantuan sprawling complexes? Well, according to my research, two major reasons existed for small hospitals and small staffs prior to nineteen thirty five. First of all, the public's perception of hospitals was that they would kill you, kill you, and yes, they would. Their success rate was close to zero. Hospitals were the last possible place the consuming public wanted to go, a last resort. The second reason was the introduction of sulfur drugs in nineteen thirty five. Basically, hospitals were useless, they would indeed kill you, but with sulfur drugs for the first time, they might actually cure some conditions, so after nineteen thirty five, hospitals grew in size and staff.

Permitting “Bribes” For Solar And Data Centers

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Second letter from Anonymous regarding the letter on bribes to build data centers. Anonymous says I can see the argument behind calling it a bribe, but only because of the way that litigation has increased costs. They're basically giving everybody money to not sue them or to not file more appeals or other disturbances. So I read into the Pennsylvania Fast Track, that was where the incident in the other letter took place. Pennsylvania doesn't allow the data center campus to bypass local ordinances altogether. So in Virginia or Texas, Solar Project is over 150 megawatts, it goes straight to the review board for approval, and those approvals are just on technical grounds. Localities then don't have the final say. Virginia says we need megawatts on the grid, and you nut jobs in county boards are denying everything. If it's less than 150 megawatts, it instead goes to the permit by rule process paired with the local county approvals. From my read, Anonymous says, the Pennsylvania program just looks to be supplemental assistance to get the project permitted at the state level, but still have to go to the local level for permits also. So obviously, those bribes are pretty important if you have to keep local folks happy. There are projects in Texas, some of them that are 200, 300 megawatts or more. The developer might pay out $10,000 to landowners right around the development because the county stipulated in the abatement agreement that it had to come up with a vegetative screening plan. So there's no more description than that. The onus is going to be on the developer to figure out what that meant without asking them. Now, if you do, if the developer asks the county board what a vegetative screening plan means, they'll answer, and that's the last thing that you want. In Texas, there's not really any zoning. Lawsuits are often the only recourse to stop solar development. So the companies figure that by paying adjacent landowners $10,000 each while partnering with a local landscaping company, you might be able to install trees on each local landowner's land to block that few shed if they chose to do so. So the developer doesn't want to put trees around 1,500 acres of property because the cost would be nuts, and it would still be far enough away from the landowner's houses that it wouldn't actually block anything. The only chance that you really get is to put trees right next to the house of the homeowner because the rolling hills the solar farm is on. The developer never specified that the in this case the homeowner had to use the $10,000 for trees, and a number of landowners called it a bribe. Um, but in this instance, the county backing that said that they had to do something to abide by the abatement agreement, and so the argument is a little bit easier. Some of the landowners rejected the $10,000, but no one planted any trees, which is what the county had said the money was supposed to be for. So it is interesting that people might say, Well, you should plant trees, and if we say, all right, you plant here's the money, and then you can plant the trees where you want them, no one plants the trees, they just take the money. End of letter. Well, thanks, Anon. That's interesting. And it is interesting that uh this experience of of calling it bribes is pretty generic.

Book Pick And Sign Off

SPEAKER_00 26:37

The book of the week is from the couple, Diana and Jerry DeLonzo, who wrote Never Be Late Again, Seven Cures for the Punctually Challenged. It's by from Post Medicine Publishing, and it was published just recently, May 19th, 2026. Well, that's it for this week, and we'll talk again next week on The Answer is Transaction Costs.