The Dangers of Nations Thinking Short Term

Post Reply
fountainhall

The Dangers of Nations Thinking Short Term

Post by fountainhall »

I have several times suggested that one problem facing the future of democracy is the near-necessity for politicians to think short-term. With the next election only four or five years ahead, that and that only is the window of opportunity. Solve immediate problems in that time and there is a better chance of getting re-elected. Spend much of that time trying to solve problems that will affect future generations and re-election is far from guaranteed.

Interesting article on the BBC website as part of a series BBC Future.
The world faces multi-generational challenges like climate change, poverty or antibiotic overuse. But for much of the time, our eyes remain locked on the present. Each news cycle brings a moment or event that consumes all of our attention, even if its effects are ultimately transient . . .
Patholigical Short-Termism
“We live in an age of pathological short-termism,” said philosopher Roman Krznaric, who is writing a book about long-term thinking. “Politicians cannot see beyond the next week, and nations bicker around conference tables, focusing on near-term interest while the planet burns.

“We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we dump our ecological degradation, risk, nuclear waste and public debt.”

“I used to be a political scientist and it never once occurred to me that we disenfranchise future generations in the same way we disenfranchised slaves and women in the past. We give them no political power, no political voice,” he said.

Cathedral Thinking

Lord Martin Rees, author of the book “On The Future” and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, spoke about the notion of “cathedral thinking” – the idea that we need a multi-generational approach to the grand challenges we face.

Centuries ago, people started to build cathedrals knowing that they wouldn’t be finished in their own lifetimes, he explained.

The puzzling thing, Rees said, is that these cathedral builders probably had much shorter horizons into the future than we do. Today, we have the mental capabilities to imagine the Big Bang all the way through to the end of the Solar System. “It seems paradoxical that we would have these much broader horizons in time and space but are more short-term, but there is a reason,” he explained.

Medieval cathedral-builders expected their descendants to have essentially the same life as them, with the same needs and desires. Not so for us.

“We have no idea what the lives will be like for our children and grandchildren,” Rees said. It is the dizzying pace of change in modern society that makes it so hard to think longer-term – but that doesn’t mean we should not try.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2019070 ... onger-term
Post Reply