People are generally bad at thinking and making decisions about long-term consequences. Gate’s Law observes that people overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. People are motivated by loss aversion which leads to status quo preserving behavior and biases people towards keeping things the same.
Individually, people find evidence for whichever mindset they have, reinforcing beliefs and making them more rigid. This makes it difficult to change the default behavior of thinking short-term. As groups, these effects are amplified—it’s even harder to think long-term when many people need to change their minds, especially if it involves the out-group (in-group favoritism).
Because long-term thinking is generally done poorly, people and businesses that operate on longer time horizons have a competitive advantage.
Links to this note
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A visualization of sustainability represented by concentric rings (hence the doughnut). At the center are twelve factors necessary to support life that array outward. The first ring closest to the center is the minimum required for society to function, but as it extends outward it reaches the ‘ecological ceiling’ such as climate change, pollution, etc.
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Lump of Labor and Why Automation Doesn’t Increase Unemployment
There is not a finite amount of work that can be distributed throughout an economy. The amount of jobs are not tied to a zero-sum, “lump of labor”. Worries about immigration and automation taking away jobs and leading to unemployment are unfounded. Since the number of jobs are not fixed, changes in the workforce and technology lead to new jobs and or simply different jobs over time.
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Governments Are Comfortable Thinking Long Term When it Comes to Infrastructure
While government tends to be short-term oriented (the election cycle drives decisions so officials can be re-elected), an area the do feel comfortable thinking long term is infrastructure. With regularity, they will initiate projects to build roads, telecommunications, buildings, and other infrastructure that takes many years to build (the second avenue subway line in Manhattan started in 1972).
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Recent Technological Advancement Is in Simulation
When comparing recent technological advancement with the previous century, most of the biggest changes are simulation versus physical. For example, railroads and airplanes compared to networking and computers.
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Psychology Overwhelms Fundamentals in the Short Run
In discussing market changes, Howard Marks, remarks that psychology overwhelms fundamentals in the short run as the reason why markets can appear irrational. This is a neat way of holding both the idea that investors are rational and markets are irrational simultaneously.