I
Much of what we hear and read today sound like complaints about short-termism and “Why are not people taking the long term far more seriously?” It takes only a moment’s reflection, however, to see how many long-runs are imported, indirectly and ambiguously, into all kinds of policy and management analysis.
“Indefinitely” and like terms squeeze time outwards or towards some later closure, e.g., “There is every reason to believe the present can’t continue this way indefinitely.” Declinism and like concepts slip in comparisons that posit “across time” as the unit of analysis, e.g., “It isn’t a question of will it happen but rather when and where it’s going to happen.” Really existing infrastructures, investments in the forward budget, Net Present Value calculations, talking about path dependencies–all and more add to that archipelago of long(er)-run orientations. Even more explicit “long-runs” appear to exist in order to differentiate them. British historians are apt to talk about the long 19th century as running roughly from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Some Western historians are more apt to talk about the short 20th century running from 1914 (the start of World War I) to 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
For me, the analytical crux is not ‘long term versus short term’, but rather complex policy and management crises are differentiated by one or more of these orientations.
II
Start with: “The present rise in health-care costs in the US cannot continue this way indefinitely.” Now, rescript the crisis through three other orientations to “the long run”: “The current crisis in health care is that we can’t predict health-care requirements with the specificity we need for taking action now”; “Health care continues to be characterized by seriatim technology and digital upheavals, one after another”; and “It’s not if, but when the next worldwide pandemic will happen.” In this reframing, “the health-care crisis” reflects not only multiple but different long-run orientations are at work, but their sequencing is a major way for differentiating and tracking time (i.e., “the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as its own health-care crisis”). In this recasting, different crises no longer unfold at different times; rather, differentiating crises are the way we unfold time.
Now complicate that notion of time further. A core urgency moves to the fore when we focus on the nature of the present in any long/short orientation: Where does ‘not knowing the present’ come into play in each orientation? It may turn out that even conventional short-termism – the present matters more than the future – requires more certainty and confidence than warrantable. The virtue of center-staging not-knowing is to remind those preoccupied with various short-runs and long-runs that predicting the future is difficult for the very same reasons learning from the past is difficult: Both require stability in objectives, institutional memory, fallback reserves in case something
goes wrong, and low environmental uncertainty. But we are in the Anthropocene: These conditions do not prevail.
III
For many, the absence of preconditions for predicting the future and learning from the past is the problem. For me, it is positive to start from the fact that not-knowing, inexperience, and difficulty are each variable. Why becomes clear
when we move to the more granular case level.
Some regional climate change modelling is of such a high resolution today that climate model results can be and are disaggregated in ways of use to some critical infrastructures. It is now possible to project estimates for rising sea-levels,
storm surges, and inland flooding in, say, 20-year increments to better reflect those already existing near- and longer-term cycles for infrastructure depreciation and forward investments, among others. Do such modelling results reduce uncertainties related to depreciation and investment cycles? No, not necessarily. Do modelling results increase
confidence that action with respect to these cycles can be taken, nevertheless? Yes, possibly: in fact, entirely possible.
NB. For more, please see my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008
