In the defense of long term planning

[lazerus]

The phrase “How can we justify funding NASA when there are starving kids in Africa?” makes my blood boil. Not because I have some great dislike of African children or some great love for NASA, but because it's representative of a trend I see in people all around me and in debates – a view that long term planning is somehow callous or even immoral.

This isn't a love of charity of a great aversion to human suffering though – you never hear the phrase: “How can you justify owning a car when there are sick kids in India?” or “How can we justify such a massive budget for killing people when we could be educating third world people?” It's always long term projects or R&D that get the cut – canceling one short term gain for another is greeted with as much resistance as ripping out teeth without anesthetic, but pillaging long-term investments is done easily and often. Even stranger, it applies to long term investments that *are already paying dividends*. In debates, online and off, I've heard people disparage the NASA moon and orbital missions as a massive waste of funding purely to flip off the USSR, and when I point out all the great results of that, I get the flippant response “And think of how much more good that money could have done if we'd invested it on earth.”

It's not technophobia – because short term R&D doesn't suffer from this and I see it in scientists and engineers as much as anyone else. And its not a puerile “Screw future generations,” attitude, because the people saying it seem genuinely morally indignant. It seems almost like the implication that the long term is less valuable – that if you propose ignoring present suffering for an investment in the long term, your callous or cold or just a bad person.

I can't understand this attitude at all – epically in light that short term planning has never done long term good in human society. How many people think that $25 billion ($125 billion in todays dollars) invested in infrastructure or charity would be worth more then the entire telecommunications industry? How many people know about government spending to revitalize the economy in 1913, vs the panama canal? How many people know the history of all the day-to-day decisions of the Roman Empire vs the benefits of their libraries and universities even today? Short term planning is something that gets nations through the day until their long-term investments yield results, yet everyone around me acts like they're the be-all end-all of national policy.

This (admittance ranting) post was placed in SLAM because ultimately, the morality of this is what confuses me. An aversion to short term planning as a simple error in judgment or lack of foresight I could understand, but the actual vehemence I see many people show towards it is puzzling. Has anyone else here encountered it in friends or contacts? What's the source of these feelings of indigence?

[Junghalli]

I think the usual attitude is something to the effect of "we should solve our big problems down here on Earth first, then we can worry about this pie in the sky stuff". Basically, they think people who want to invest resources in stuff like the space program have their priorities wrong.

I'd say the big downside to that kind of thinking is it pretty much guarentees those projects aren't happening at all for a long time, if ever. There'll probably always be some social problem that "needs to be solved first".

[Kon_El]

Its just like people who spend all of their money on little things that make their life easier right now and then don't have any savings when a big expense comes up. Some people are genuinely unable to think long term.

[Narkis]

It's simple shortsightedness. If the average person can't see the results now, or at least before the next elections, then money spent is money wasted. Doesn't matter if 10 years from now that money will revolutionize his life. It's just too much time until then.

[Garlak]

One reason could be... it's much easier to be more sympathetic to, or emotional about, starving children in Africa, than moonrocks. Most likely any arguements they might bring up to defend the short-term projects... are based on nothing but air and fallacious reasoning.

[Darth Wong]

You shouldn't characterize such things as "long-term planning". A lot of these things are done for other reasons, not because there's any real long-term plan to make them useful. When the Americans decided to go to the Moon, they didn't plan ahead of time to use the project in order to invent technologies that might become useful in the commercial market. That just sort of happened (and realistically, if that was the plan, they could have done it far more cheaply by investing in those research projects directly, instead of incidentally).

The problem is that the general state of mankind has been advanced countless times throughout history by actions which, if tested on this "have we solved all of the problems of mankind yet" scale, would have been rejected. In fact, instead of long-term planning vs social problem-solving, one could look at this question as an analogy for the military balance of offense vs defense.

An all-defensive strategic approach would devote 100% of resources toward strengthening defense against attack, or in this case, social problems. But it would never defeat the enemy, or in this case, actually solve problems rather than merely managing them. In fact, such an approach is almost universally considered to be totally ineffective, because it consumes all of your resources to merely hold the line, without accomplishing anything.

In order to accomplish something, you must devote some of your resources to offense, or in this case, attempting to advance the abilities of mankind.

[lazerus]

Elegantly said. I think I'm going to steal that metaphor for another debate.