In his new book, The Long View: Why We Need To Transform How the World Sees Time, BBC journalist Richard Fisher explains how this short-term mindset has come to dominate Western society, why that could spell disaster for our future, and explores historic and real world examples of those who are taking a long-term view.
From the architects who began work on England’s Wells Cathedral in 1175 knowing that construction wouldn’t be complete until well after their deaths, to an experiment at an Australian laboratory still ongoing a century after it began, and the Indigenous tribes whose ways of life are centered on intergenerational links, Fisher argues what makes humans unique is our ability to learn from the past and envision the future.
Q: How is that short-termism manifest?
A: You see it in business where the financial quarter dominates corporate thinking, the needs of shareholders in the market, encouraging company leaders to only think in cycles.
When I was an R&D EE in the semiconductor fabrication industry, this aspect of the business model used to just drive me crazy. SOME THINGS just take longer than 90 days. In fact SOME THINGS might well take 300+ days particularly if the project in question has never been done before or is pushing the limits of semiconductor physics. The bean counters never seem to understand … or maybe … are unwilling to understand that you can’t invent on schedule. Eventually, after 2+ decades of this nonsense one just punts …
Q: What ways can we take the long view?
A: If you look back in time, you can see that there have been long-minded views that existed in the past. And if you look around the world today, there are some people, organizations, cultures and societies that are more long-minded than others.
I desperately wish we could get back to this long-view mindset from times past.
I confess that I am quite pessimistic about our capability as a collective much above the Dunbar number to do so. I think the answer does rely on hyper-local effort focusing on communities below the Dunbar number, but coordination of those communities is a big problem.
This is what makes me despair on reversing climate change: our collective inability to focus beyond even a year … much less 100 years.
I think the only real answer at this point is a dedicated A.I. farm aimed at the climate change problem running thousands and thousands of TPU/GPUs. I really do think we are toast if we don’t. Maybe stop calculating cryptocurrency hashes, and re-dedicate all that compute at this one problem. But of course that loops back to the original problem of short-term gain vs long term mentioned above.
This post is provoking a lot of thoughts for me.
The article doesn’t get into it until near the end – that key to the long view is awareness of the inter-generational implications of whatever legacies we create whether it is manifest inventions, social structures or ideas, and I agree.
I did not see it address how far back or forward to take into consideration. I am thinking the rate and magnitude of change we are generating is inherently a limiting factor. A century may be too long in practicality.
Also I believe appropriateness is as transient as anything else. That should be factored in, which may lead to a kind of short term thinking where today’s creations are made to disappear or easily uncoupled from the fabric of everything else.
No one knows the future for sure, and it seems few people even know what happened in the past. Perhaps we can get better at finding clues in the relics, and at the same time learn to make more accurate predictions.
“If you look back in time, you can see that there have been long-minded views that existed in the past. And if you look around the world today, there are some people, organizations, cultures and societies that are more long-minded than others”
Good one to reflect one ….thks.
>I did not see it address how far back or forward to take into consideration. I am thinking the rate and magnitude of change we are generating is inherently a limiting factor. A century may be too long in practicality.
Just from the perspective of humans staying focused on a specific local project (this may relate directly to the Dunbar number) the cathedral in Köln began construction in 1248 and wasn’t completed until 1880 for a span of 632 years.
A “human generation” is ~28 years (10,000 days) anthropologically speaking** … Take 632/28, and you get about 22.6 generations. If you consider that this cathedral was begun in the high middle ages, and not completed until the Romantic era, you can see that once upon a time humans were capable (at least locally) of long term thinking. So humans in Köln focussed on this one building for 22.6 generations. That at least tells us that we are capable of … a 632 year view (upper limit) at some local level, which should give us a wee bit of optimism. Is that possible globally? I have no idea, but if I were to bet on it, I would doubt that global coordination could persist much beyond 250 years. At least there seems to be no historical precedent for that. And, I guess that’s why I am personally fairly pessimistic about us solving climate change globally.
**https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=generations
I think many indigenous peoples have a much longer view than the typical Euro–American one, which began to resemble the voting cycle…. about four years.