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from the nothing-lasts-more-than-8-years dept.
Mankind has a history of long term projects. The Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Great Wall, getting Mickey Mouse into the Public Domain...
Some of these projects took multiple centuries of effort. Not a single person present at the start of those saw them completed. This is made worse when you consider lifespans that were half or less what they are currently.
But what was the LAST project that spanned lifetimes? Do you know of any going on today?
The Great Wall was started in 300 B.C. and completed some 1900 years later.
As humanity considers things like colonizing other planets and space megastructures we are talking about activities that will take centuries of effort. This turns into millennia as we look at things like terraforming and actually spreading humanity beyond our own star.
Does humanity in the current instant gratification social media quarterly results era have the appetite for projects that our grandchildren won't see completed?
(Score: 2) by number11 on Tuesday December 25 2018, @01:12AM (3 children)
American capitalism has, anyhow. Anything that rates results based on a quarterly timescale (that is, any C-level management whose bonus depends on it) is a problem. Government does better at using a long time horizon (not that government's choice of projects is always good), because they don't have the pressure to turn a profit. Japanese capitalism seemed good at long horizons at one time, no idea if it's still true.
It seems to me that capitalism was better at it in the age of robber barons, when there were no hedge or vulture capitalist funds.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 25 2018, @01:33AM (2 children)
American capitalism never had much appetite for the long term, including the age of robber barons. In the 1860s, the Transcontinental Railroad took a bit under a decade, which is much less time than multigenerational, but that was still too long and risky for the market to stomach. Took a great deal of government aid in the form of huge loans to induce the capitalists to try. The ones who stepped up to give it a shot had a rough start fighting off vulture capitalists who were hoping they'd fail, and even tried a few things to up the odds of failure, so as to stifle competition, and perhaps so their assets could be picked up for pennies on the dollar. Even after the Transcontinental Railroad succeeded, they still needed the government loans to build other transcontinental lines. The Panama Canal, another extremely valuable infrastructure project, took a great deal of government patronage to make it happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @03:32AM (1 child)
I love witnessing this echo chamber of people who can't figure out that the government doing something isnt capitalism. Its like nothing is wrong about what you are saying except you are applying the wrong label since you were somehow taught the wrong definition.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 27 2018, @02:24AM
You're a little off-target. The government didn't build a trans-continental railway. Nor did it build the Panama canal. Capitalists did that - the government just gave them massive incentive to do so.
Without that incentive it can be reasonably assumed that things would have continued on the same path as before it was offered - and the capitalists would have continued investing in things with a much shorter return on investment, while the large-scale infrastructure remained a pipe dream.
Which seems to be rather the parent's point.