Taking the Long-Term Seriously
Why the long-term future matters, and what we should do about it.
Politicians are often accused of being too short-sighted: of focusing on the next election, or the next fundraising dinner, rather than on the issues that matter in the long-term. Most of us rightly consider this myopia to be a major flaw of our present political scene, either due to a moral failing in our politicians or a structural failing of our electoral democracies. While we so often rail against the short-termism of politics, though, few of us ever properly consider its opposite: an active focus on addressing long-term issues. This, in my opinion, is a serious blind-spot: it’s time to start taking the long-term seriously.
Political values vary; from human rights and economic growth to more abstract philosophical concerns, such as the wellbeing of conscious creatures, or the promulgation of virtue. While it is important for every political actor to know what values they care most about, taking the long-term seriously doesn’t require us to preference any particular set of values over another. In this sense, it is a project that can be shared by people across the political spectrum.
“…if we afford even a small amount of moral weight to future generations, the long-term impacts of our actions quickly overwhelm any short-term considerations.”
The basic case for long-termism can be summed up as follows: whatever it is that we care about in the present, we have reason for thinking that there will be a lot more of it to care about in the future. Accordingly, we ought to care an awful lot about ensuring that the future goes well.
The things we value will grow in number as we do. Firstly, this is a simple observation of population growth. Unless current trends reverse, we can expect that future generations will likely be larger than ours, meaning each generation will contain more people to live potentially valuable lives. Secondly, and more importantly, the future will also likely contain multiple generations. Our present population is a fraction of the total population of past generations, and it will pale in comparison to the total population of all future generations. Whatever we hold to be of value, then, there will likely be much more of it in the future than there is today.
If, through our actions today, we spoil the prospects of future generations, we will be worsening the lives of trillions upon trillions of people, and wasting the potential of humanity. If, on the other hand, we manage to improve the long-term future, and preserve those things we care about so that others can go on caring about them, we will doing good on an equally significant scale.
Given this, if we afford even a small amount of moral value to future generations, the long-term impacts of our actions quickly overwhelm any short-term considerations.
“…one key outcome of long-term thinking is that mitigating the risk of human extinction should be a major priority…”
While the moral value of future people is a notorious philosophical problem, it seems to me that most people intuitively believe that future people deserve some moral consideration. Consider, for example, the current debate around climate change: while we will certainly experience some effects of its effects in our lifetimes, by far the most significant impacts will be on future generations. And, while climate change is a divisive issue, political debate is typically centred around either the credibility of climate science, or the economic impact of proposed policies, not the question of the value of future generations. Even Malcolm Roberts tends to shy away from claiming future generations do not matter at all.
The problem with focusing on the long-term, of course, is that predicting the consequences of our actions far into the future — even beyond just a few years — is immensely difficult, whereas short-term consequences are much easier to predict. There’s a reason that weather forecasts only extend to a few weeks at most: in complex systems (such as the environment), small changes can compound rapidly and chaotically, to make any specific forecasts almost impossible. This is the origin of the so-called “butterfly effect” — the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Congo can alter the path of a tornado weeks later in the Philippines.
However, even in the face of this general difficulty in making predictions, there appear to be at least some long-term outcomes that we can expect to significantly affect with our actions today. Perhaps the most salient of these is human extinction: if humanity goes extinct, then future generations won’t exist at all, erasing the overwhelming value they might otherwise contain.
As such, one key outcome of long-term thinking is that mitigating the risk of human extinction should be a major priority, for political institutions, scientists, entrepreneurs, and non-profits alike.
Consider, for example, an all-out nuclear war between major world powers. Such an event would be catastrophic, both for people alive at the time, and for the long-term future of humanity, potentially wiping out any such future at all. Furthermore, it’s not as radically unlikely as many people seem to think. Throughout the 20th century, there were over a dozen nuclear “close calls”, including several where the decisions of a single person were all that stood in the way of legitimate nuclear war.
With the end of the cold war, we have reason to believe that these risks are slightly diminished. However, as tensions again build between two nuclear powers, this time the US and China, nuclear risks are once again intensifying, and as long as we keep nuclear weapons on hair triggers the world over, we heighten our collective existential risk. Given the overwhelming scale of what is at stake, even if nuclear war was much more unlikely than it is, we would still be compelled to devote serious resources to avoiding it.
“One lesson we should learn from the COVID-19 pandemic… is that our intuitions about risk are often wildly wrong.”
The same reasoning applies to other policy areas. Climate change is one obvious contender. Even if it does not pose a strictly existential risk, it nonetheless has serious potential to be very damaging to our future. In particular, climate change carries significant second-order risks. That is, it has the potential to amplify other existential risks, such as world war, by destabilising the geo-political order.
Pandemic risk, whether natural or artificial, is also high on the list. There are strong arguments for the prospect that future pandemics will be substantially more destructive than COVID-19. This risk is massively heightened by factory farming, which creates perfect incubation centres for animal viruses such as bird flu, and by the growing possibility of ‘engineered pandemics’ for biological warfare or terrorism.
“…humanity spends more each year on ice cream than we do mitigating technological existential risks.”
Another priority from the perspective of mitigating existential risk is ensuring the safe development of new technology, especially artificial intelligence. There is no guarantee that technological development will always prove beneficial to humanity; we should thus be working hard to ensure that technology as potentially transformative as artificial general intelligence is transformative in a way that is beneficial.
I understand that to many readers, these risks can feel rather abstract, and separate from our present needs. One lesson we should learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, however, is that our intuitions about risk are often wildly wrong. How many can seriously say they grasped the enormous potential impact of COVID-19 back in February 2020? And yet this virus has now killed millions, wrought economic havoc, and changed day-to-day life the world over — and this is only the beginning of how bad global pandemics could get.
Taking the long-term seriously means taking seriously risks that may seem abstract, or far-removed. This is an imperative which is currently seriously neglected; at present, humanity spends more each year on ice cream than we do mitigating technological existential risks. We need to remember that when it comes to human extinction, it’s not just the people alive at the time of the extinction event that will be lost; it’s the future of humanity itself. From a long-term perspective, this is an overwhelming loss, and deserves far more attention than it presently receives.
“Current economic practises… are nothing but reckless present bias.”
Long-termism needn’t compel us to focus only on existential threats, however. There are other ways in which present actions and policy decisions can have somewhat predictable outcomes on the long-term future, and these areas also deserve our attention.
Expanding educational opportunities in both developed and developing countries seems likely to have positive long-term impacts, in at least two clear ways. At a personal level, providing people with education enhances their ability to improve their own lives, and the lives of their children. Education is also valuable from a long-term societal perspective, as it increases the number of people who can contribute to society more broadly. This means that more people can work to provide innovative political or technical solutions to the existential risks outlined earlier. Moreover, flexibility matters: if we are uncertain about the problems that lie in our future, then intellectual diversity is more important than pushing students into disciplines which are conducive to our present needs.
Ensuring sustainable economic growth is also useful: if even a very low level of economic growth is sustained for many years, this will drastically increase our available resources — resources which can be devoted to improving people’s lives, or safeguarding the future. This shouldn’t be growth for growth’s sake, however. If we believe that the long-term value of our actions is important, how we facilitate growth matters. This means more money for investment, and less for present consumption — and crucially it means both a cultural and institutional shift.
A long-term focus should also lead to more emphasis on sustainability. Current economic practises, such as our reliance on fossil fuels, and a blatant disregard for pollution, habitat-loss and environmental degradation, are nothing but reckless present bias.
Taking the long-term seriously means putting such concerns at the centre of political discussion and policy creation. It means taking seriously the stakes when gambling with existential risk. And it means focusing much more than we currently do on the long-term impacts of all government policy; in particular science, environmental, economic, and education policy.
This is, of course, difficult to do given our current institutional framework, which seem to incentivise and reward short-term behaviour in politics. And, while several research institutes and non-profits, working under the banner of Effective Altruism, are making some progress on long-term issues in the non-government space, there are clearly certain areas that will require government action. As such, a final item on the long-term agenda needs to be critically evaluating our present political institutions, in order to invent and implement reforms which can allow a more central role for long-term thinking within politics.
The short-termism so prevalent in politics can be disheartening. However, the sheer importance of the long-term compels us to find solutions, no matter how difficult this may be.
This line of thought is not at all original: it draws largely on the arguments made by Toby Orb in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, and on recent discussion of ‘long-termism’ within the Effective Altruism movement in general.
For further discussion in this area, I encourage you to read The Precipice, or engage with the UQ Effective Altruism Club. For a shorter introduction to key philosophical ideas, this article by Jess Whittlestone, is very useful, and for practical advice about projects which are likely to improve the long-term future, this page on the 80,000 Hours website is a fantastic resource.
