Restoring the Power of Long-term Thinking

There is a fundamental tension in our democracies between a necessarily short electoral horizon and the need to take decisions over time. In recent years, the decision-making horizon has moved ever closer, with a politic an increasingly unstable political landscape, short-termist financial players and issues such as climate change, previously considered remote, suddenly appearing before our very eyes. How can we regain a sense of the long term?

The discussion could address the following questions:

What are the issues - technological, social, climatic - that today require a long-term vision? Is French-style planning a solution? Are there successful examples of collective deliberation to prepare long-term decisions?

Are the logics of immediate financial profitability holding back the investments needed for ecological and technological transition?

Is the economists' preferred solution - entrusting certain tasks to authorities independent of politics - still acceptable?

Is it possible to regulate the global economy when different countries have different preferences for the present?