Thinking for the Long Term
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"The origin of civil government," wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1739, is that "men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote."
Today, Hume's view that governments can help societies abandon rampant short-termism and adopt a more long term approach, feels little more than wishful thinking. The "now" commands more and more of our attention - quick fixes are the order of the day. But could that be about to change?
Margaret Heffernan asks whether the current pandemic might be the moment we are forced to rediscover our ability to think long term. Could our ability to emerge well from the current health crisis be dependent, in fact, on our ability to improve our long-term thinking?
Among those taking part: Paul Polman (Co-founder of Imagine and former CEO of Unilever), General Sir Nick Carter (Chief of the Defence Staff), Justine Greening (former Conservative minister and founder of the Social Mobility Pledge), Lord Gus O'Donnell (former head of the Civil Service), Chris Llewellyn Smith (former Director General of CERN), and Sophie Howe (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales).
Producer: Adele Armstrong Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:41.0 | Hello, thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis. podcasts. and author of Uncharted How to Map the Future. |
| 0:55.0 | Over the next half hour I'm going to explore whether we've lost the ability to |
| 1:00.0 | plan for the long term and what that might mean for policymaking. |
| 1:04.0 | They said it makes no sense that's crazy. |
| 1:08.0 | I kept being asked by people, |
| 1:10.0 | tell us what you're going to discover and I said I can't do that if I knew what we were going to discover I wouldn't have to build it. |
| 1:17.0 | In the 1990s Chris Llewellyn Smith was Director General of Cern, the biggest physics lab in the world, |
| 1:25.8 | and he was raising $3 billion from national governments for the biggest machine in the world. |
| 1:31.6 | What would those countries get for their money? He couldn't say, how could you value work that had never been done before? |
| 1:37.9 | He couldn't promise anything, only that when science thought big it achieved big. |
| 1:44.0 | The people who founded Cern who were rather senior, long-sighted people who could understand |
| 1:51.0 | that this was a long-term commitment. |
| 1:53.2 | Serm was successful technically, so the governments have tended to say if the certain people |
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