Short-Term Nation
Why can’t America think ahead?
One of my favorite bits from Conan O’Brien’s 1990s late-night show was “In the Year 2000.” Conan and his sublime sidekick Andy Richter would sit in the dark wearing very low-budget sci-fi costumes, their faces illuminated by flashlights. A guy from the band (La Bamba, if I recall correctly) would sing, in a silly falsetto, “In the year two thousaaaaaaaaaand,” and then Conan and Andy would make ridiculous predictions about what life might be like in the future.
One of the things that made this great was that the year 2000 was not a distant, futuristic date to Conan and Andy — the oldest version of the skit I can find on YouTube is from 1997. It was funny to see Conan pretend that he was an oracle, peering into the fog of the future, when, in fact, the future he described was, like, 18 months away. And, of course, Conan and Andy kept on doing the routine right through and beyond the actual turn of the millennium.
In some ways, Conan’s stance as a fake soothsayer was prescient. Over the last 25 years or so, America has become like him and Andy, a country that can barely look ahead at all. We’re a short-term nation, and it’s going to come back to bite us.
In the business world, there seems to be far too little thought given to the long run. Perhaps the best example of this is the growth of…
