Book review: Future-Generation Government: How to Legislate for the Long Term, by Nicholas Chesterley.
This book has some good theory about how governments could behave more far-sightedly. It is a bit too academic to be a very practical guide to action.
Chesterley has a mostly ordinary description of the causes of short-termism. Here are two factors that I found to be the least ordinary:
Easterners (e.g. Koreans) and religious people are more long-termist than non-religious Westerners (see Religious people discount the future less, The neural basis of cultural differences in delay discounting).
The growth in the scope of government over the past century has led to an unusually large range of topics that demand the attention of elected officials. That either causes or selects for ADHD in politicians.
Chesterley has four solutions.
The one I like most is to better measure what we care about.
As a supplement to measuring GDP, we should measure gross domestic wealth, in much the way that companies document a balance sheet in addition to their income.
Debates about health would likely improve a bit if national health were measured. I guess the life expectancy figures are a start, but there are obvious ways to improve on them.
But be aware that investors have had good reasons to pay less attention now than they used to. I wrote some caveats about balance sheets in a prior review of a book about intangibles.
Chesterley’s second solution is to make long-termism easier, using:
- Guardrails: mechanisms that remind people of considerations that might get overlooked. E.g. scenario planning or having a devil’s advocate. The connection to long-termism here is less clear than I’d hoped.
- Tripwires: mechanisms that alert us when we’re off track, such as an alarm clock or the debt ceiling.
- Defaults: the stereotypical example is setting up a bank account to automatically transfer money from a checking to a savings account. A better example would be automated changes in a payroll tax to stabilize employment, as described in this post (alas, Singapore’s actual tax changes are not that automated).
The third solution involves making firm commitments. An example is when president Kennedy made a widely broadcast speech promising to put a man on the moon by a certain date. If done correctly, it helps businesses rely on policy being something they ???. Alas, I see little sign that voters are currently interested in electing a president who can do that.
The fourth solution is to iterate and experiment, instead of trying to convince people that whatever policy is first proposed is certain to work well. This would be an excellent way to bring the quality of government up closer to the quality of business. But I’m unclear whether this will affect how much attention governments pay to the long term.
I’m sufficiently discouraged by the low tractability of Chesterley’s solutions that I’m tempted to advocate that we focus on curing aging as a better way to cause voters to care more about the long term.