Short-Term World
In the 1930s and ʼ40s, then president Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his fireside chats, a series of radio addresses on the Great Depression and World War II that were instrumental in quelling rumours and explaining his policies to the 60 million Americans listening (about half the total population at the time).
He gave about thirty of these addresses over the twelve years of his presidency. When encouraged to do them more frequently, he responded: The one thing I dread is that my talks should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness … Every time I talk over the air it means four or five days of long, overtime work in the preparation of what I say. Actually, I cannot afford to take this time away from more vital things.
Electorates and a 24-hour news cycle demand instant opinions and action in response to an endless stream of new events.
Roosevelt’s ability to think through and deliver the chats, a crucial part of his leadership with significant long-term benefits, came in part from how much time he could dedicate to preparing them. It is almost impossible to imagine a modern leader dedicating four or five days to a single topic or speech, much less doing so repeatedly.
Instead, modern politicians, who address the public daily, speak less well than Roosevelt and spend less time focused on important long-term issues. A politician sending hourly tweets or giving daily pandemic briefings has only so much time to spend on long-term decisions and also has less time to think through the content and its long-term implications.
Daily Distractions Undermine Long-Term Thinking
The sheer scale of incoming information and news for a modern politician can be hard to fathom. Sorting information is often more of a challenge than finding it. New ideas and technologies emerge quickly and spread faster.
Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, two economists best known for estimating that nearly half of US jobs could be automated in the next twenty years, point out that telephones took seventy-five years to reach 50 million users; Facebook took three and a half years; and Angry Birds, the digital game, took thirty-five days to reach the same number.
Every minute in 2023, the world watched forty-three years of streaming content, did 6.3 million Google searches, sent 41.6 million WhatsApp messages and 241 million emails, and liked 4 million Facebook posts, producing a total of about 100 megabytes of data per person per minute or the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of pages of text.
This speed is not just limited to technology either. New fashion trends, cultural practices, viral videos, and other phenomena can spread like wildfire across social media.
Unfortunately for our leaders, they are often expected to have opinions on and responses to all these events and trends before they have had a chance to reflect. Worse yet, a single ill-considered reaction or comment can itself become a meme or social media event, consuming yet more bandwidth and time and generating more short-term pressure. No politician wants to go viral for saying something that makes them look unprepared or ignorant.
No Time to Reflect: The Long-Term Costs of Instant Reactions
Even within their own bailiwick, individual politicians are expected to have thoughtful and informed opinions about new bills or legislation moments after they are released, despite the fact that bills may run to hundreds of pages. Electorates and a 24-hour news cycle demand instant opinions and action in response to an endless stream of new events.
There is little time for sober reflection or analysis and little ability to maintain focus on the long term. A politician in the fifteenth century hoping to fully understand the printing press and assess its long-term consequences could have taken decades to assess the risks, while one worried about the privacy implications of AI today must respond to daily updates.
Scarcity focuses us on the immediate problem, creating a sort of tunnel vision that means we neglect other concerns.
It can be tempting to blame the media for short-termism and accelerating an already short news cycle.
In truth, 24-hour news coverage is the result, not the cause, of many of these trends. In a hyper-accelerated world, the rapid rate of change means it is natural for citizens to demand fresh news on an ongoing basis, and the media responds to that demand.
In a world where new apps are released daily and technology is continuously updated, it is understandable that citizens feel pressure to stay up to date. In meeting this need, the media also reinforces the trend, leading to a still greater sense of acceleration.
The rapid news cycle has benefits: the public gets access to news quickly, and the media plays an invaluable role in society supporting transparency and accountability. The problem is that even when the information is correct, the deluge of information means that readers frequently don’t have time to absorb or assess it. The recent rise in concerns over fake news points to a readership that does not have time to evaluate the reliability of what they read, instead sharing information without pause. It also means politicians must be up to date on every possible issue whenever they speak to the media.
When Visibility Wins: The Neglect of Long-Term Issues
What impact does this torrent of information have on governments and leaders? First, it may focus government attention on short-term issues directly. The impact of media attention can be particularly problematic because of what are called attention cascades. In effect, as people start to pay attention to an issue, other people assume the issue must be important and start paying attention themselves, further accelerating the cascade. This can focus attention on the short term, since the media often does not prioritize stories based on long-term importance.
In one study of five thousand natural disasters, for example, gradual disasters such as famines and droughts required thousands of times more deaths than sudden and highly visible crises such as volcanoes and earthquakes to draw the same amount of media attention. Disasters that had more news coverage received a larger response from authorities, but it is not clear why some types of death should be prioritized by authorities over others.
The modern world is marked, perhaps above all, by the speed at which information flows.
Politicians that rely on headlines as a way of identifying what to focus on are over-focused on highly visible, short-term issues, and under-focused on slow-burn, long-term issues, at least until the long-term issue sparks a crisis itself. In other words, they are short-sighted.
Even a government that is elected hoping to address long-term issues may find they are swept up in a current of events and short-term urgencies that prevents them from doing so. The modern world has increased the pressure on politicians to react and respond in the now, making it harder for them not to get caught up in the constant day-to-day churn of events that require responses or spin. In the clamour around the short-term, governments can struggle to identify or prioritize long-term issues.
The Psychological Toll of Short-Term Political Pressure
The volume of information and the need to react immediately also affect the psychological state of decision-makers. Work by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, professors at the University of Chicago and Princeton University respectively, has highlighted how the experience of scarcity can make it difficult for people in poverty to plan for the future or think beyond the needs of the immediate moment. Politicians and senior bureaucrats may not be low income, but they are desperately short of time, and this can lead to a scarcity mindset, narrowing attention and even reducing IQ.
Scarcity focuses us on the immediate problem, creating a sort of tunnel vision that means we neglect other concerns. Unfortunately, the more we expect politicians to respond to the constant stream of crises and other events, the more a scarcity mindset can manifest, leading to increasing neglect of the long term. Just as income scarcity can drive decisions that solve a short-term problem but create a long-term one, such as borrowing from a payday lender, so too politicians may be tempted to take the short-term fix to whatever problem confronts them, even if it creates a long-term issue.
As Mullainathan and Shafir point out, policy-makers can be quick to judge the poor as irrational or unmotivated to do better, when they should be asking whether there are situational factors leading to specific behaviours. The same holds true for politicians: if our modern world forces them into a cycle of scarcity, then we need to find ways to help them manage or avoid that cycle and the short-sighted tunnel vision it can create. Payday borrowing and short-term political action can represent a response to scarcity, a need to put out fires, rather than a lack of awareness or sophistication.
Corporate Short-Termism and the Disruptive Role of AI
Businesses face the same problems. CEOs may not be selected through regular elections, but they face tremendous pressure to respond to the now, from quarterly earnings reports, regular investor calls, and other channels. Twenty-four-hour news cycles mean businesses must constantly respond to events, derailing long-term planning or prioritization and creating a scarcity mindset.
Unfortunately, this can often cripple their future. A 2017 study argued that based on five criteria – investing relatively little, cutting costs to boost margins, initiating lots of buy-backs, booking sales before customers pay, and hitting quarterly profit forecasts – 73 per cent of firms are focused on the short term. The remaining, relatively long-term-focused 27 per cent of firms performed better than their peers in terms of revenue growth, investment rates, stock price growth, and number of jobs created.
Though it is still emerging, AI may also increase the distractions facing policy-makers. AI provides a way to promptly produce endless custom, unique letters about a topic that can be sent to politicians or used to provide input on a given policy. What does it mean to run a consultation and ask the public for input if 10 million letters are received in response, with 99 per cent of them written by an AI controlled by a single individual or group?
The rise in deepfakes and other fake but realistic AI-generated content ultimately means more noise that can drown out important long-term issues. Of course, AI may also provide tools for politicians to identify and negate distractions. Time will tell whether AI ends up a help or a hindrance. But in the short run the development of the technology is likely to complicate rather than simplify things as society struggles to adapt to AI’s new capabilities.
Escaping the Crisis Trap: Reclaiming Long-Term Focus
In summary, the deluge of events and information in the modern world can both focus attention on short-term crises and provoke politicians into a state of scarcity, narrowing their focus and ability to plan for the long term.
In the same way that such interruptions can preclude deep work by individuals, they can do the same for politicians, who are forced to respond to the day-to-day rather than ensure they are tackling the key issues. In a world where a Twitterstorm can provoke a scandal or resignations in hours, governments do not have the luxury of taking time to reflect and plan. We live in a very different world than that of Roosevelt’s fireside chats, where the president of the United States could take four or five days to prepare a single, high-impact speech.
The modern world is marked, perhaps above all, by the speed at which information flows. Our governments do not have the option of turning off or tuning out. Instead, they must find ways to stream out the unimportant or non-essential so that they can prioritize the important, or they will find themselves drowned in minutiae, struggling to respond to every crisis before ending their time in office and realizing they have not yet achieved anything of note. Fortunately, as we shall see, behavioural science can also inspire some possible solutions.
