“This is the age of the tyranny of now: our politicians can hardly see beyond the next election or even the last tweet; companies cannot see beyond the quarterly report; markets go up and down in speculative bubbles; nations sit arguing with each other at international conferences while the planet burns and species disappear. And our task is to escape from the pathological short-termism that we have inherited and see, think, love and dream beyond the present time”, affirms the philosopher Roman Krznaric in an online conversation with La Vanguardia.
His is one of the many voices that have risen in recent times from different fields of study and analysis against the prevailing short-term thinking.
The problem with short-termism, explains Krznaric, "is that it blinds us to the long-term challenges facing society" and while politicians, economists, scientists and citizens have their attention focused on the now, "they are not thinking about planning for the next pandemic, in how to deal with the risks of technologies such as artificial intelligence and biological weapons, in facing the deep economic and racial inequalities that are transmitted from generation to generation or in facing the consequences of the climate and ecological crisis”, such as the drought.
As he explains in his latest work, The Good Ancestor (Captain Swing), the solution to all these challenges involves recovering a long-term vision or what he calls cathedral thinking, referring to the artisans who dedicated their lives to working in cathedrals. that they knew they would not see finished or enjoy.
“It is important to understand our relationship with the future at a deep level; I think we treat it as a distant colonial outpost where we can freely offload ecological degradation and technological risk as if no one were there, because future generations are not here now to do anything about it," says the philosopher.
That thinking about the interests of future generations has long been the leitmotiv of the Savia Foundation, created to promote the values of the rural world. “We are committed to today, in the me and in the now, and if we continue like this, what are we going to leave our children and grandchildren? I am an economist, I visualize the macroeconomic data, and you can say that we are at a determining moment in history because we are not in a position to guarantee that our grandchildren can have a level of well-being, not even like the one we enjoy today”, affirms Antonio Aguilera, General Secretary of Fundación Savia.
He explains that in this institution they are so clear about the need to promote long-term thinking in all decision-making areas that they consulted with the United Nations some time ago about the best way to create the figure of the defender of future generations. The organization's response was to spread the word and encourage this social concern.
So they got to work: they wrote a document explaining why an institution at the global, state, regional and local level is necessary to guard the interests of those who have not yet been born, and they have managed to get more than three thousand city councils from all of Spain (Seville and Valencia among them), as well as some councils, several universities, cooperatives, schools, companies and individuals have already signed a motion to adhere to the project.
And countries like the United States, Finland, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Belgium, Scotland, Malta, Sweden, France, Wales, Germany, Israel, Canada and New Zealand have already created this figure of Defender of Future Generations, "which has in The well-being of those who have not yet been born counts, who do not buy and do not vote, because today it seems that all decisions are made for mercantilist or electoral reasons, ”says Aguilera.
Add that, in Spain. Some party has tried to propose a similar initiative in Congress "but we don't want it to be a partisan proposal but to emerge as a collective project so that no one opposes it, but politics is so polarized and focused on the short term that we are not finding the necessary listening capacity to work on it”.
Luis Miller, a doctor in sociology and a scientist at the CSIC's Institute of Public Policies and Goods, assures that it is not only philosophers, but that more and more governments and companies are aware of the need to think more in the long term and are creating foresight offices. to try to anticipate future problems such as climate change, population growth or decline "because if you don't anticipate, the costs are higher."
The problem, he says, is that these types of initiatives "come up against daily politics, which does not want to commit itself beyond the electoral cycle, which is getting shorter every time because every year there is an election that is interpreted in national terms, so that everything is planned for months, not even for four years”.
Miller, who in 2021 was an adviser at Moncloa's National Foresight and Strategy Office, points out that another problem with planning in the medium and long term is that the issues, however important they may seem, last "a breath" in the political agenda.
“Governments are running after public opinion and not setting their own agendas, and when they have to apply restrictions or important changes thinking about the future, that polarizes and causes political confrontation (we have seen it in France with pensions), because what we need in the medium and long term, it normally has short-term costs that are not well received by the present generations”, he comments.
And he stresses that this causes "a vicious circle from which it is difficult to get out because the government that tries to take measures to anticipate the future ends up losing the elections and populist parties that propose magic formulas win."
Iñigo González Ricoy, professor of Political Philosophy at the UB, agrees that politicians have no incentive to adopt measures whose results are not visible before the next electoral cycle if they have costs for citizens, but points out that, in politics, the short term is not always negative.
“Sometimes short-termism is raised as a matter of selfishness, but all the investigations find that, in general, the willingness of people to sacrifice their current interests for future interests does not depend on how virtuous they are but on the institutional context in which they have to decide. In situations of uncertainty, for example because there is a lot of corruption and it is not known if the projects will be carried out or the funds will be diverted, there is less willingness to make sacrifices than if one trusts that the sacrifice will lead to the promised results”, he explains.
He adds that, in addition, long-term political decisions require transversal consensus that the current polarization makes impossible "because any attempt to apply far-reaching reforms (whether on climate change, early education or pandemic prevention) by governments is immediately discredited." by the opposition bloc.
Joan Carles March, a specialist in preventive medicine and public health, explains that this lack of long-term vision hinders progress and improvements in the field of health. “There is little strategy and a lot of action by action; there are many beginnings of change but the plans are abandoned with little progress made, and plan is made after plan but no significant change or improvement is achieved”, he says.
And he gives primary care as an example, "where focusing on the patient who is seen every day, without thinking about the problems of that population, its health determinants, and without designing community health programs and strategies has led us to the crisis current".
To this is added, says March, that decisions are made based on short-term economic criteria, without a vision of future problems, and this means that, for example, now the professionals that are needed are not available or obtained.
The neurobiologist Mara Dierssen, head of research at the Center for Genomic Regulation of Barcelona, explains that the bias of the present is very human and the culture of immediacy has aggravated it, and that is why politicians, aware that their privileges may not They pass a legislature, make decisions and demand results in that time frame, even if that hinders many activities.
He assures that science would be one of the areas that would clearly benefit from the recovery of long-term thinking, and that is why movements such as Slow Science have emerged. “Slowing down research procedures would allow us to reflect to be sure that we are asking the best questions, and to assess the long-term impacts of what we do on knowledge and on people,” he points out.
And he stresses that having research policies with an eye on the long term would allow "extracting the full potential of scientific and technological knowledge, creating the conditions to make great advances."
María Loureiro, professor at the University of Santiago and specialist in environmental economics analysis, stresses that climate change is one of the areas where the tyranny of short-termism is most evident and does the most damage.
"Most companies prioritize immediate success, immediate return to shareholders, and this implies that investments are not made to have a long-term forecast (for example, in climate resilience) because it can affect current benefits," he explains. .
And he believes that from the point of view of economic analysis, great opportunities to consider future generations and design good climate change adaptation policies are being lost.
“Being short-sighted is discounting the future a lot; We are worsening the environmental situation because future damage is underestimated, because we do not have clear incentives to appreciate the future in the same way as the present.
Enric Prats, professor at the Faculty of Education of the UB, assures that technology has accelerated changes in all areas and that forces us to think on two levels: that of immediacy to respond to the urgent, and that of means and long term to attend to what is important.
And in education that is decisive because there are aspects that cannot be subject to political changes or urgent day-to-day situations, but that cannot prevent solving the urgent. The key, she says, is to have "a broad horizon and that decisions are more or less adjusted to it instead of being moved by the urgent needs of the day."
Joan Riera, professor in the Department of Strategy and General Management at Esade, believes that the double speed that Prats talks about is also essential in the business field. “Today everything changes very quickly, more and more, and agility and flexibility to adapt to that change are rewarded, and that is short-termism; but at the same time you need a navigation system that provides you with information about what is happening outside your business, and that is the long-term vision”, he points out.
He adds that this long-term vision is how to put the high beams on the road to see where the next curve is but also to provide oneself with a purpose and an innovation system that allows opening new paths and leaving continuity to survive. “If you only think about the quarterly results, you are going to make an incremental, continuous innovation, and not something more radical that is what the environment demands”, he says.
The professor of Social and Environmental Psychology at the UB, Enric Pol, assures that there are also reasons for personal and social well-being that should encourage us to break with the tyranny of short-termism and recover a long-term vision.
“If you don't have a project in the medium and long term, your frustration and your feeling of impotence grow a lot, and the person is left extremely vulnerable,” he explains.
And he denounces that “the social and economic power structure is very interested in short-termism and the non-future of people because that puts us in a situation of learned helplessness: you think that whatever you do is useless, you lose the effect of society civil that self-organizes and has the possibility of changing society to become a mere customer who consumes”.
He considers that it is this situation of defenselessness and powerlessness that largely explains the growth of the extreme right: "it promises you identity, decision-making capacity, that you will influence something... The promise is a promise, even if it is not fulfilled."
Nor does the immediacy encouraged by social networks “and which leads people to prefer the Kings League because a football game is already too long” does not help to think about medium and long-term objectives, says Pol.
