Long-term planning and human welfare

Comments here brought up the human trait of weak capacity to do long-term planning. We now possess technologies that can significantly wreck the environment by pollution and climate change. There are nuclear bombs that can blow modern civilization to smithereens in a matter of a day or two. There are pandemics coming that we are just not prepared for. Heck, we're still not prepared for the one we are living through right now. Global supply chains are weak and sometimes break. 

Science is aware of human weakness about long-term planning and preparation. We often just don't do it well enough and react to crises when they pop up instead of planning for them before they hit and kill or harm people. A long article The Conversation published, Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term? Three experts discuss, considers the issue. It's an interesting article and topic. TC writes:

We are built this way

Robin Dunbar

COVID-19 has highlighted three key aspects of human behavior that seem unrelated but which, in fact, arise from the same underlying psychology. One was the bizarre surge in panic buying and stockpiling of everything from food to toilet rolls. A second was the abject failure of most states to be prepared when experts had been warning governments for years that a pandemic would happen sooner or later. The third has been the exposure of the fragility of globalized supply chains. All three of these are underpinned by the same phenomenon: a strong tendency to prioritize the short term at the expense of the future.

Most animals, including humans, are notoriously bad at taking the long term consequences of their actions into account. Economists know this as the “public good dilemma”. In conservation biology, it is known as the “poacher’s dilemma” and also also, more colloquially, as “the tragedy of the commons”.

If you are a logger, should you cut down the last tree in the forest, or leave it standing? Everyone knows that if it is left standing, the forest will eventually regrow and the whole village will survive. But the dilemma for the logger is not next year, but whether he and his family will survive until tomorrow. For the logger, the economically rational thing to do is, in fact, to cut the tree down.

This is because the future is unpredictable, but whether or not you make it to tomorrow is absolutely certain. If you die of starvation today, you have no options when it comes to the future; but if you can make through to tomorrow, there is a chance that things might have improved. Economically, it’s a no-brainer. This is, in part, why we have overfishing, deforestation and climate change.

The process underpinning this is known to psychologists as discounting the future. Both animals and humans typically prefer a small reward now to a larger reward later, unless the future reward is very large. The ability to resist this temptation is dependent on the frontal pole (the bit of the brain right just above your eyes), one of whose functions is to allow us to inhibit the temptation to act without thinking of the consequences. It is this small brain region that allows (most of) us to politely leave the last slice of cake on the plate rather than wolf it down. In primates, the bigger this brain region is, the better they are at these kinds of decisions.

In humans, failure to inhibit greedy behavior quickly leads to excessive inequality of resources or power. This is probably the single most common cause of civil unrest and revolution, from the French Revolution to Hong Kong today.

There is a simple issue of scale that feeds into this. Our natural social world is very small scale, barely village size. Once community size gets large, our interests switch from the wider community to a focus on self-interest. Society staggers on, but it becomes an unstable, increasingly fractious body liable at continual risk of fragmenting, as all historical empires have found.

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The power of politics

Chris Zebrowski

“Discounting the future” may well be a common habit. But I don’t think that this is an inevitable consequence of how our brains are wired or an enduring legacy of our primate ancestry. Our proclivity to short-termism has been socialized. It is a result of the ways we are socially and politically organized today.

Businesses prioritize short-term profits over longer term outcomes because it appeals to shareholders and lenders. Politicians dismiss long-term projects in favor of quick-fix solutions promising instant results which can feature in campaign literature that is distributed every four years.  

Our capacity to deal not only with future pandemics, but larger-scale (and perhaps not unrelated) threats including climate change will require us to exercise the human capacity for foresight and prudence in the face of future threats. It is not beyond us to do so.

This is another example of importance of human cognitive biology and social behavior. Everything or almost everything we do comes back to that. So, if one wants to understand humans, politics and religion at least a little better, one needs to learn at least some things about those aspects of human beings.