Is it wrong to be short sighted?
This article discusses the tendency of democracies to be short sighted. One of the reasons Trump has a good chance of winning in 2020 is that the US economy is booming, in part because of a short term tax break. The above article points out that this is an old tactic known as the 'political business cycle.'
Would it be better for democracy to evolve to be more long sighted? Is that even possible in a place like the US? I say no: the only alternative for the US is dictatorship, which would mean we'd have to rename the country because it wouldn't be the USA anymore.
Or is there some secret wisdom in being short sighted? I think that's a possibility. The longer the range of a plan, the more widespread and deep its consequences are likely to be. That means depending on the wisdom of today to try to protect the children of tomorrow. Maybe we aren't that wise and allowing things to evolve naturally without interference is the smarter plan. I'm prone to supporting that theory.
Would it be better for democracy to evolve to be more long sighted? Is that even possible in a place like the US? I say no: the only alternative for the US is dictatorship, which would mean we'd have to rename the country because it wouldn't be the USA anymore.
Or is there some secret wisdom in being short sighted? I think that's a possibility. The longer the range of a plan, the more widespread and deep its consequences are likely to be. That means depending on the wisdom of today to try to protect the children of tomorrow. Maybe we aren't that wise and allowing things to evolve naturally without interference is the smarter plan. I'm prone to supporting that theory.
Comments (32)
This is how I see politics (and decision making in general):
Net Pleasure
I use a definition of pleasure and pain includes all forms of pleasure and pain: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual etc… I can then define ‘net pleasure’ as:
Net Pleasure = Pleasure - Pain
So for any decision, it is in theory possible to calculate the resultant ‘net pleasure’ for each of the possible outcomes. This is the variable that all intelligent life forms try to/should try to maximise during decision making.
Long Term > Short Term
The key determinant in maximising net pleasure is a consideration of the implications of the decision in the long term. Because long term > short term, net pleasure is maximised by doing what is right in the long term, even if it involves short term pain.
Even for senior citizens, life expectancy is around 10 years, so we are all long term creatures and all benefit from long term decision making.
Right Decisions / Policies
Right is typically ‘what is right in the long term’ - short term pain is exchanged for a larger amount of long term pleasure
Wrong Decisions / Policies
A wrong decision is typically ‘what is right in the short term’: short term pleasure is experienced but is outweighed by long term pain.
Left and Right Wings in Politics
Left is another name for wrong. So we have 'wrong wing parties' and 'right wing parties'. But the left invest more in the long term - which is the right thing to do. So right and wrong are the wrong way around. It should be as follows:
Right Wing / Republican - Short term. Should be called the 'Wrong Party'
Left Wing / Democratic - Long term. Should be called the 'Right Party'
The only way to change this is to either (a) make it so that politics can't be an ongoing career, or (b) make it so that the requirement to perpetuate politics as a career is to come up with "deep," widespread, long-term solutions to problems. It's up to us, really. We're the ones who vote for the reasons we do, who care about the things we care about that get people elected, who allow the system as it currently is to be sustained, etc. We can't really blame career politicians. They're just working in a niche, and per the metrics, that we've allowed to develop.
Well, I just mentioned two things that we can do:
(a) make it so that politics can't be an ongoing career, or (b) make it so that the requirement to perpetuate politics as a career is to come up with "deep," widespread, long-term solutions to problems.
We could also stop caring and voting primarily on things like sex scandals and start caring whether politicians are actually tackling and solving issues that impact folks' daily lives whether they pay any attention to politics or not. Things like health care and education and the ability to find and maintain work that can enable folks to live without worrying how they're going to pay for necessities.
Hasn't this kind of thinking lead to climate change, and the last-chance-saloon Extinction Rebellion? We have, acting naturally and without interference, consumed the natural resources, cleared the forests to grow cash-crops, and thereby taken the habitats away from the creatures living in them. A million species are currently in danger, and many thousands are already extinct. Our progress, largely based on short-termism, has been spectacularly unsuccessful: hurtling toward extinction as we are. We don't care about tomorrow, provided our employer's shareholders get their dividend, and our managers get their bonuses and pensions. Profit is all that matters. Short-term profit.
Oh, heavens, no! What possible advantage could there be in the electorate being more far sighted? Silly you.
Obviously, it would be better, but... by what means can the people, the parliament, or the dictator become "far sighted"? Which society is it that has solved this problem? Were the French far sighted, they would have planted oak trees 200 years ago to replace the timbers required to repair today's burning cathedrals. Or they might have put better fire protection in Notre Dame's attic 6 months ago.
Were San Franciscans far sighted they wouldn't have rebuilt their city on the spot where it was destroyed in 1906. Were Californians far sighted they wouldn't have built Los Angeles in the first place. There are a lot of things that should just have never happened.
It seems to be very difficult, if not impossible, for groups of people to plan for future goals that are more than 25 or 30 years away. What we do is create organizations that are on going and frequently repopulated by new people and new plans. Ancient religions are still here because somebody kept the sacred fire for 3, 11, 17, or some number of years at a stretch, then somebody else took over. Political parties stay in business for 150 years because every 2 years they have an election to attend to. Plus, politicians have to look after their domains every day.
Personally, the longest period for which I've made plans was about 30 years, and that plan didn't work out very well. I've managed 5 and 10 year plans, but that's about it.
And at this point, a lot of people are expecting this quarterly result to be better than last quarter's, or else it's "sell".
We've been able to get away with all sorts of disastrous behavior because the consequences don't loom up over the horizon quick enough.
Yes, but impossible in the current form. This is the biggest critique against democracy, especially representative democracy, that it is a paradoxical system; Without expert knowledge and insight into everything you cannot vote for experts to rule everything. Current democracy tends to become demagogical in every case applied. Only after a disaster does the status quo change and always balance itself too far in one direction.
Quoting frank
If the consequences are widespread and deeper and made with the intentions of improving society, is always good and better than anything short-term.
How do you define "evolving naturally"? In what way does something "evolve" without interference? Evolution and progressive change only occur if there is interference towards what is static. And short term interference with the static always leads to a higher probability of disaster, by examples throughout history.
Today's anti-intellectual smack talk against intellectuals and experts is the result of the increasing individualistic society in which people claim themselves to be experts, but rarely see past their short-sightedness because of it. This leads to an increase in movements like anti-vaccers who are responsible for the return of diseases which were almost extinct.
The reason for this, I think, is that the internet brought forth a way to search for information by yourself, without any tools of how to find out if what you gather is true or not. Because of this, people have been living in a world where people start to question knowledge itself, all while clustering together in tribalistic groups online.
It's a soup of ultra-cognitive-bias. The marks of such groups are higher shortsightedness because they don't have the tools to question and research their own conclusions. All while others within the group validify their conclusions back and forth. That means they cannot see past the short-term. None of this is good for society. In order to evolve society naturally and improving on it, you need to progress with long term insight and methods, otherwise, you could just flip a coin and decide society based on it. There are far too many examples of suffering and disasters coming out of short-sighted decisions.
Indeed. The issue here is trust, I think?
On the other hand, didn't our hunter-gatherer ancestors do just fine for 100,000 years of short term thinking? What changed?
EDIT: I should add, "presumably" to that statement. The anthropologists hadn't arrived on the scene 100k ago.
Population growth, larger groups than 12 people at a time, politics for larger societies, global scale politics, religious-based laws etc.
I could make a long list that equates down to... society is almost infinitely more complex today than during hunter-gatherer times and because it is more complex, there are far less short-term solutions and far more long term consequences of the choices made as nations, groups and globally.
I think the philosophy-infused series "The Good Place" has a point about this as well.
Assuming this is true, what should we do about it?
Exactly. You can't really feel responsible for not having a time machine.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. :up:
Anyway, this is sort of the issue that crops up in academia about whether structural issues related to economic foresight is warranted or not. In practice, here in the US, the FED is responsible in a reflexive manner to deal with turbulence and such. In theory, automatic stabilizers are supposto deal with turbulence and economic downturns, but, nevertheless market failures do occur.
I don't know. I suspect it's too late to do anything except perhaps to minimise the damage that will be left after we're gone (but there's little motivation for us to do that, is there?).
Doesn’t much matter if we lack a keen nose for BS :)
Yeah... that was just him saying "I can never have kids being the gay person that I am, so **** you Darwin!"
I tend to think it is too late; 40 years ago, we would have needed 40-50 years to make significant changes in our relationship to energy and the environment. We could have done that, but we didn't. 40 years have passed and we have made just a little progress (all of us, not just the USA). We still need 40 years (or more) to make the radical changeover from fossil fuels and heavy-chemical-use agriculture, assuming that those efforts were now fully underway--which they are not. By the time we completed those difficult changes, levels of CO2, methane, water vapor, and so on will have passed the tipping point by some years, if it hasn't already. Another 40 or 50 years of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides and our goose will have been thoroughly cooked.
I don't think gay guys in his generation were hankering after heterosexual reproduction. More likely he was saying, "This is what economic planning can do in the short run. In the long run we're all dead.
According to writers like James Howard Kunstler, and others, it is difficult to even imagine a way of living without petroleum and coal and their various byproducts. It could, theoretically, be done. It would mean initially dropping back to agriculture as it existed in the 19th century. Industrially, it would mean dropping back to 17th century industry -- only a little industrialization. It would mean a return to horse power, and small-plot farming. Railroads would be difficult to sustain without the heavy industry of coal and steel production. Autos and highways would be out of the question. The population would drop precipitously. The lifespan would be shorter (even with medical knowledge intact). Production of drugs and medical equipment is a heavy chemical industry too. It takes a lot of feed stock and energy.
Kunstler's A World Made By Hand series depicts life in a community reduced to 19th century tech. It isn't terrible, but life there is much simpler, much quieter, much thinner, and in the event of disease or serious injury, much shorter.
The human footprint was greatly enlarged in the 19th century, and hugely enlarged again in the 20th. IF we wanted to save the rest of the natural world and some of us, we would have to forgo that hugely magnified footprint in favor of a size close to our natural, size 10 footprint.
There is no way of maintaining life as we know it now and reducing our footprint to a much smaller size. It's an either/or choice.
I suppose you mean:
There is no way of maintaining life as we know it now without reducing our collective footprint.
OK, let's take the example of the TV. They used to be heavy, bulky, cost-intensive, and inefficient. You seem to have this idea the other way around in that things are getting more expensive, less efficient, and more cost intensive, which anyone in economics would look at you with a funny eye. The simple fact of the matter is that economics deals with scarcity, and making products less cost-intensive and more efficient is the whole goal of the field. If you want to talk about the real issue here, being population growth, then that's a problem that we don't yet [s]know how[/s] want to deal with.
I never got into macroeconomics and microeconomic theory; but, typically there's a focus on microeconomics within the field currently. So, in regards to the policy of net aggregate demand and determining long term goals and plans, which is governed by population growth, there's a lack of motivation to address these issues on a macro scale, until they start affecting microeconomic profitability and growth. I think, delineating between where microeconomics starts and where it ends, is where the issue lays in this thread, at least.
What YOU don't seem to get is that the economic world we know, ever increasing efficiency, decreasing cost and all, is built on and depends on cheap plentiful oil, coal, and natural gas. What nuclear power can not do is provide feed stock in place of these three substances. The entire agricultural, domestic, and industrial machine is fueled by, processes, and requires cheap feed stock. There is no substitute for oil, coal, and natural gas as feed stock or fuel. Yes, electricity created by nuclear, wind, and solar is possible and is being produced, and more will be produced in the future. But solar, wind, and nuclear do not produce one drop of petroleum that can be turned into the gazillion products that fossil fuels can be turned into.
As we run out of coal, oil, and natural gas we run out of a critical substance that is a) cheap, and b) plentiful. Nothing comes close.
Your economy of growing efficiency and decreased cost will become moot once oil disappears. And it will disappear. (Technically, there will be oil left in the ground no matter what, because it will require more value to get it out of the ground than it can have as a product.
IF we favored insects, birds, fish, plants, and megafauna (including ourselves) we would cease and desist from as much industrial activity (including automobile transportation systems) as possible. A LOT is possible -- people just wouldn't like it.
This discussion isn't the trivial communism vs. capitalism question. It is existence vs. oblivion: What will it be? The route we are on leads to oblivion. Death. Avoiding oblivion means capping the oil wells and closing the coal mines before it is too late. Life won't be the same if we quit using coal and oil. It is the choice of life not being the same or life not being at all.
This is true to some degree. But, the basic unit of exchange in terms of manufacturing and production is predominantly heat and electricity, not coal and oil. Furthermore, it's just not true that oil is irreplaceable. Oil can be produced from coal in a non-pollutant manner (the Nazis did it during WWII), along with methane being utilized to produce oil. I'm not an expert here; but, even CO2 can be utilized to create hydrocarbons. So, let's not mix up things here. It's possible to derive oil from other sources if it is necessary to produce crayons or lubricants or other derivatives of oil from it.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well, as I said, it is possible to derive oil and hydrocarbons by other means. It's just that it's quite an energy-intensive process to do so and impracticable at the moment. But, assuming that we do continue to use oil and gas, then the costs will rise and make it more feasible to do so. So, the real barrier here is energy production, not the net total of oil that can be found through fracking or other sources.
Interesting read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
Yes, that's true. The Germans made synthetic gasoline from coal. Many cities in the US (and elsewhere) had coal gas plants up until the 1950s, when natural gas pipelines replaced coal and goal gas for heating and cooking. These plants were not exactly environmentally friendly, because goal gasification and synthetic fuel production leaves a lot of waste material that is difficult to dispose of in a harmless manner.
Keep in mind how much oil will need to be replaced: the world currently produces and consumes about 34 billion barrels a year -- each barrel containing 42 gallons. Now, we are not going to run out of oil next week. The peak in the curve of supply is a half-way mark. So, we have been extracting oil since say... 1880. The peak was in 1980, and the practical end of extraction will be around 2080 assuming that the current extraction rate continued. The end of oil won't be like falling off a cliff. It will be more of a fizzling out. We see signs of fizzling in the US -- fracking is an effort to maintain production in marginal geologic formations. In the end, a lot of oil will remain in the ground -- not by reason of ecology, but because the energy required to extract it will be greater than the amount of energy in the oil.
Switching to electrified transportation and an all electric world will obviously reduce the use of oil for fuel (it won't eliminate it, because pound for pound, gasoline contains a lot of energy and is very portable). Completing the changeover to the all-electric world will take... oh, at least until 2080, probably longer. That's only 61 years away.
I'm not sure how long the coal supply would last if we switched to coal to replace petroleum and natural gas.
We can make hydrocarbons by cooking garbage at high pressure; we can reverse engineer waste plastic back into an earlier stage of manufacture. But these sorts of maneuvers take a lot of energy. It would take more energy to make 1 million gallons of crude oil out of x million pounds of garbage than you would get back.
There are all sorts of researches going on into various sources of raw material; algae; lignin (the tough plant fiber); corn, etc. Some of them are kind of crazy -- using corn to make fuel for cars. Corn production is too resource intensive and too hard on the soil to keep that up for a long time.
Part of the solution is to live a much simpler lifestyle that requires less energy, fewer raw materials. This isn't a plan to live in the woods eating roots, berries, and squirrels. I won't go into what "simpler lifestyle" means.
And with the continued valiant efforts of the antinatalists, the population will start dropping and billions will avoid having to live happily ever after.
Good or bad consequence?