Long term planning in the age
of instant gratification is a contradiction in terms, and yet this is what's
pursued nowadays in many fields of development, especially what concerns
economic strategy.
Instant gratification does not
just mean a child asking for candy, and he is instantly given a package of
Smarties. No. The concept is more complicated than that. In fact, to better
understand what's involved, it would help to recall an observation once made by
the geneticist David Suzuki.
Speaking of students he used
to teach, he said that they had the attention span of a fruit-fly. The
significance of using the fruit-fly to draw a parallel, is that the critter has
a very short lifespan. This allows the geneticist, in a short period of time,
to see how an acquired genetic trait is passed on from generation to
generation.
And so, if in the absence of a
credible scientific study, it can be postulated that a short attention span,
and the desire for instant gratification are the two sides of the same coin, we
can see why it was possible to fool the short-attention-span generation that
grew up to be in charge of the ship of state –– into believing that it can have
instant gratification by doing this and that in foreign policy, or doing this
and that in economics.
The first people to take
advantage of this phenomenon were the Jews who, time after time, convinced the
hungry for instant gratification zombies in the Washington Beltway, that if you
bomb an Arab or a Muslim country, and nothing happens in the first 24 hours, it
means that nothing will happen in the long run.
Therefore, said the Jews, you
can spend the next month or two bombing the country into the Stone Age and
you'll be safe. America took the advice to heart and never removed its finger
off the trigger. It was not until years or generations later that America
realized there are long term consequences to its behavior.
Now that the world is going
through an economic upheaval, the subject that's foremost on the mind of most
people is economic performance. What you see, is a short attention span that’s
playing a major role at motivating the decision makers in Washington. It pushes
them to use the tools at hand to implement strategies they did not fully
develop. A good example to study and see how that works, came under the title:
“China's Export Performance Will No Longer Threaten the US Economy,” written by
Desmond Lachman, and published on July 26, 2020 in The National Interest.
If you set aside the notion
that a superpower's economy can be threatened by that of another superpower,
and you only wish to understand how––in the view of Desmond Lachman––the
economies of America and China relate with each other in some ways and yet
contrast against each other, you'll find that Lachman is basing his argument on
two dubious notions.
One notion has to do with the
premise that on paper, the Chinese economy looks shaky, therefore it is about
to grind to a halt, if not collapse entirely. Well, that notion is easily
dispelled if you were to remove the word “China” from Lachman's passage, and
placed the word “America” in its stead. In fact, the reality is even more
shocking. It is that if America had China's woes, it would be much better off
than it is today.
The other notion has to do
with the premise that there was a time when the Japanese economy was
threatening the American economy, and then by some miracle, the threat
disappeared. Therefore, Desmond Lachman expects that the same thing will happen
with China, and things will get back to normal, which is that America will
again lead the world with no challenger nipping at its tail.
And this is where you’ll see
how the short attention-span/instant-gratification mentality plays a role not
only among the talking heads of the boob tube and the unruly mob of print
journalism, but also among the highest-ranking officials of America's decision
makers. Now, my friend, I ask you to carefully read the following passage from
the Lachman article because you'll be asked to reconcile a few things:
“This year, there has been a
marked slowing in Chinese economic growth. In response, the Chinese government
has resorted to increased credit growth to kick-start the economy. This will
only further inflate the Chinese credit bubble, which will further mortgage the
country's future economic growth potential. China very much needs rapid
long-run economic growth if it is to grow its way out of its credit bubble”.
So, here is what you have to
reconcile: (1) Lachman wrote the article to study the effect of one economy on
the other. (2) Lachman described a Chinese economy that may have suffered a few
hits due to the current pandemic, but remains much ahead of the American
economy that suffered even greater hits. (3) Lachman has concluded that the
Chinese economy will no longer be in a position to affect the American economy.
How can you reconcile these 3
points without accepting the notion that the attention span of the people doing
the deciding, is so short, they would have forgotten point (1) by the time they
reached point (2) and would have forgotten point (2) by the time they reached
point (3)?