We know an increasing amount about how human beings work as groups, the kinds of stresses they face as individuals and how reason and nature play off together. We know enough to counsel people and help them through trauma and loss, we know enough to write books that they read to help them understand ‘themselves’.
Historian have no trouble at all in looking back through the threads of human thoughts and tracking ideas and strands through thousands of years. It is fascinating to see how ideas have been found, lost, found in another part of the world, added to and finally become mainstream in modern societies.
Given this, why is it that politicians only plan for the next few years? Why is it a tyrant plans for his lifetime, grooming a son to carry on the tyranny later in his life? What is so difficult about planning for the next hundred years? After all we all want to get through the next hundred years as countries, as a species and some of us as individuals.
The problem is we do not plan for ourselves. All the planning that goes on is chained to planning for the banks, and economics has no long term planning needs it is always a short term fix. We may want to dream about having space colonies in a thousand years time, but economics can only see the market trends of the next decade at most.
You cannot plan for the future with a myopic system.