Democracies have a blind spot when it comes to the long term. From issues such as pensions, health and social care, and infrastructure through to climate change, biodiversity, pandemics, and emerging technologies, we find repeated failures to develop robust policies that safeguard the interests of future generations.
Climate change has become the paradigmatic case of short-termism. Over decades, democratic governments have been warned about the long-term impact of climate change and the need to reduce drastically emissions of greenhouse gases and to invest in adaptation. Their response has been painfully slow. In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the worldâs governments committed to reducing warming to 2 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels, with the aim of achieving only 1.5 degrees of warming. The more radical 1.5 degrees ceiling requires net zero emissions across all nations by 2050. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), realising this ambitious goal will entail ârapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings) and industrial systemsâ.1 The UK government has led the world in legislating for the net zero target. Yet the Committee on Climate Change, empowered to report regularly on the governmentâs progress, has questioned its commitment and its capacity to achieve this goal.2 No democratic government has seriously embraced the necessary long-term structural change that achieving net zero requires.
While 1.5 degrees warming will significantly reduce the likelihood of catastrophic impacts of climate change, extreme weather incidents such as flooding and heatwaves, species extinctions and sea-level rise will still increase, threatening livelihoods over decades, particularly for the poor and most vulnerable. The record of democratic governments on capital investments in implementing infrastructure and natural disaster defences is poor, which suggests that the building blocks for more concerted climate adaptation are not in place. Many democracies are plagued by utility distribution systems and transport networks that are near breaking point. Capital spending too often papers over the cracks. The pressure on governments to respond to more frequent natural disasters is rising, whether these be the impact of drought and bush fires on communities in Australia, hurricanes in the United States, more regular and intense flooding in the United Kingdom, or heatwaves in unprepared cities around the world. Democratic governments can often put in place impressive disaster response operations, but the planning and investment that would protect vulnerable communities from the social and economic miseries that natural disasters bring in their wake is too often lacking.
Short-termism is also generating major social policy dilemmas. The ageing populations of our democracies place particular strain on health and pension services designed for previous eras. A focus on acute hospital-based treatment means that preventative services are often underfunded. Childrenâs services that ameliorate problems early, public health strategies that promote healthy living, and social care services that enable long-term conditions to be managed in communities are starved of money. In the United Kingdom, governments have continually avoided dealing with the social care crisis. Official report after official report has been published, but politicians are unwilling to act. At the same time, political parties compete over how much they will invest in the health service â never enough to keep up with the increasing demand caused by the lack of preventative action in other policy domains. Austerity cuts reinforce these false economies, placing further strain on acute care in hospitals. As the Health Foundation argues, â[a] failure to take a long-term view of the value of investments that promote and maintain peopleâs health means that recent trends in government spending are storing up problems for the futureâ.3
The recent COVID-19 epidemic is a final example that highlights how a lack of long-term thinking can have negative systemic impact. The failure of many democracies to plan effectively for pandemics increased the death toll and put health and social care services under intense stress. Democracies have been forewarned. Building on previous intelligence assessments, the US Director of National Intelligence stated a year before the outbreak that âthe United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for supportâ.4 Similarly, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board â an independent monitoring and advisory body convened by the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization â warned in 2019 that trends such as global air travel and climate change significantly increase the risk of a pandemic. The report lays out plainly the imperative to build strong, coordinated, and well-financed response systems.5
A clear theme emerges. Inadequate policy responses to climate change, infrastructure, health, and pandemics are just four examples of âdemocratic myopiaâ â the tendency towards short-term thinking in democratic decision-making. We could reflect equally on the failure to consider burdens placed on the future in areas of policy as disparate as pensions, housing, education, and nuclear waste and in emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.6
These various policy challenges share similar characteristics: they entail immediate costs designed to ensure long-term gains. In more traditional areas such as health and pensions, some gains will be felt immediately by those directly affected by the policy change. Other areas, such as education and infrastructure, can take more time to realise benefits. The temporal characteristics of climate change are particularly challenging. Any effective response requires that extensive costs be borne by current generations, so that generations yet unborn may benefit. The time lag between action and its consequences means that current generations will not witness the fruit of their endeavours.
In all policy areas, not acting stores up problems for the long term. From a purely economic perspective, it is generally more efficient to act now than in the future. The Bank of England has estimated that between $4 and $20 trillion assets could be wiped out if the climate emergency is not tackled.7 The much lauded Stern review The Economics of Climate Change, commissioned by the UK government in 2006, provides clear and unambiguous evidence that the benefits of strong, early mitigation considerably outweigh the costs of not acting.8 The review estimates that unabated climate change will cost 5 per cent of global GDP each year (more dramatic predictions run as high as 20 per cent). In comparison, the cost of reducing emissions would account for only 1 per cent of global GDP. A similar story can be told for natural disasters. Estimates from the United States suggest that every $1 spent on preparedness is equivalent to about $15 of the future damage it mitigates.9
Long-term challenges are not simply technical problems to be solved by experts. They generate significant ethical conundrums. Political decisions need to be made about who gains and who loses. Policy options have differential effects within and across generations. A common tendency is to view future generations and their interests in aggregate. For example, different policy responses to the climate emergency will place varying burdens on current, near future, and far future generations. This assumes that different generations have their own collective interests. Such an assumption is deeply problematic. As Simon Caney argues, it âtolerates outcomes in which some lead appalling livesâ.10 It fails to recognise that, within future generations (just as in our own), significant imbalances of power will exist, with different vulnerabilities to policy impacts across social groups. National income statistics such as GDP aggregate costs and benefits, hiding significant differences in well-being within and across the current generations. The economic pie may get bigger, but the slice available to the poorest may be getting smaller. Increases in GDP can mask accelerating inequalities. The same will be true for future generations, if we consider them in aggregate. Policy choices have distributional effects, creating and reinforcing differentials in social and economic power and vulnerabilities within and between future generations. The IPCC provides clear evidence that current decisions on the mitigation of greenhouse gases will affect the number and location of people vulnerable to sea-level rise, heatwaves, and food shortages. Our decisions about adaptation strategies entail political choices about what social groups in what locations and in what generations to favour. Technical expertise takes us only so far. Political judgements have to be made about the relative weight that should b...
