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The BBC has an interesting article on short-term thinking in humans, and attempts by various people to get society to think long-term instead:
For many of us currently in adulthood, how often can we truly say we are thinking about the well-being of these future generations? How often do we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they ripple into the decades and centuries ahead?
Part of the problem is that the ‘now’ commands so much more attention. We are saturated with knowledge and standards of living have mostly never been higher – but today it is difficult to look beyond the next news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with ever-shorter periods now shaping our world. To paraphrase the investor Esther Dyson: in politics the dominant time frame is a term of office, in fashion and culture it’s a season, for corporations it's a quarter, on the internet it's minutes, and on the financial markets mere milliseconds.
Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.
[...] the longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference in time – considering the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of our short-termist ways?
People tend to value rewards received in the future less than they value the rewards received now --- in the sense of "I'd rather have a hamburger today than 10 hamburgers three weeks from now". Coupled with improved technology, this has lead us to the 24-hour news-cycle life that society is in now: we are inundated with "breaking news items" that use up our stamina and we never take the time to think long-term. In practice, this means we tend to use up resources without making provisions for kids, grandkids, or descendants 1000 years into the future. We use various rationalizations of this behavior (when confronted with the accusation), but careful analysis shows that we are mostly wrong (as long as we value individual future humans as much as individual humans alive today).
While it's a fairly long read, I think it's worth the time: some ideas that I've heard before are placed in a wider context, and there are several references that I, at least, wasn't aware of.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:33AM (2 children)
Interesting, but no, short term thinking is definitely not our biggest mental problem. Even the article implicitly admits that if there is an increase in short term thinking, it is more a product of our current social environment than an innate property of our minds or instincts.
For instance, in the past, people have spent centuries on building projects. Start building a cathedral in the 1400s, and finish in the 1800s. Sagrada Familia was started in 1882 and is expected to be completed around 2030.
If anything requires long term planning, it's space exploration. Just covering the vast distances will take many years. Sending a probe to Alpha Centauri, nearly the closest star system, would take about 70,000 years at the speeds the Voyager probes travel. If we can accelerate a tiny probe to 0.1c, it's still going to need some 50 years to reach Alpha Centauri and send back data.
And parents are constantly thinking of their children's futures. Parents do not want to screw things up for their children. Many will think far ahead, for instance, think about paying for college when the child is still in preschool.
I'd say sociopathy, greed, destructive competitiveness, and sheer stupidity are bigger problems. So far, we've kept our competitiveness restrained enough not to reach for the nuclear weapons. Hopefully that means that's not going to be a killer problem. Greed could be a bad one-- its closely related to short term thinking-- but I think we can manage it. Which leaves demagoguery and other idiocies as perhaps the #1 worry.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:40AM (1 child)
Yes, but ...
In the 1920's and earlier people expected to near future to be pretty similar to the present. They weren't always right, but they were usually right. Today that's a very bad bet. When I went to college, I didn't worry about whether the specialties I was training for would still be needed when I graduated...and I was right. Today I wouldn't know what to suggest that kids study.
When you believe that you can reliably predict the future (in broad) then long term plans make sense. When you don't believe that....
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:52PM
History repeats.
This is the roaring 20s all over again.
At the end is a war and a huge global recession.
Care to place a bet who will cause it this time?