timelets

...the beliefs that individuals, groups, and societies hold which determine choices are a consequence of learning through time - not just the span of an individual's life or of a generation of a society but the learning embodied in individuals, groups, and societies that is cumulative through time and passed on intergenerationally by the culture of a society.

--- Douglas C. North, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1993.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html