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Business Daily: The long view 

09/12/2011

The long view 

BBC World Service - Business Daily, The long view

Why the short term tends to triumph: some radical strategies for long term thinking.

Why the short term always tends to triumph - we have some radical strategies for long term thinking.

Europe's leaders have met this week for the umpteenth time this year to try to draw a line under the debt crisis in the eurozone.  

Wrong debt crisis say environmentalists. They believe the "ecological debt crisis" is the real disaster waiting to happen: the fact that we are all consuming more resources and producing more waste than the biosphere can cope with. 

The best example of this crisis is climate change, and for the last two weeks officials have been meeting at the UN Climate conference in Durban, South Africa in search of a solution.  

It is a measure of the difficulty of the negotiations that even coming to an agreement just to have more discussions is reckoned to be a success.  

So why can't the world's politicians tackle a problem that many scientists say is the biggest threat facing humanity, or for that matter the debt crisis in the eurozone?  

It's because we're so bad at long term planning Dan Arielly , a behavioural economist a Duke University in America, tells Justin Rowlatt.

Water sharing between nations is another good example of the difficulties of taking the long view. 

One of the key consequences of climate change - according to the International Panel on Climate Change - will be changes to the water cycle.  And that's likely to make conflicts over supplies of water between countries more common.  

Justin Rowlatt interviews David Zetland, a senior water economist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who has studied the potential for water conflict.   

The clear message is that, when making decisions about the long term, it is always best to take the long view.  That's certainly what economist Don Croton believes.  

In 2007, when he was 82, Don says he first realised the scale of the coming economic crisis. For him it had frightening echos of his childhood experiences in the 1930s.  So he began the long process of writing his memoirs. 

Don hoped that there might be lessons for contemporary policy makers in his eyewitness testimony.  He wanted to describe the effects of poverty, the way long-term unemployment errodes the soul and the destructive effects of the loss of hope. He tells Business Daily his story.

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