Escaping the Trap of Short-Term Thinking
What natural disasters can teach us about basic human bias.
When the Mississippi River flooded in 1927, it unleashed untold devastation. The thousands of miles system of levees constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers meant to protect against such an event, which had held up fairly well to that point, stood no match for the record hundred year flood. Waters swamped over the river’s vast flood plane and displaced roughly half a million people from Missouri to Louisiana. The monumental rebuilding task which followed, intensified by the Great Depression starting in 1929, meant it would take decades to recover a fraction of what had been lost.
The term “hundred year flood” refers to a flood event with a magnitude so large that it occurs roughly once every hundred years. The truth is that the system in place had been designed to withstand the ten year flood, and even the twenty year flood. Had the walls been constructed just a few feet taller, they might have prevented the destruction of countless communities on the Mississippi Delta and the up to one thousand deaths of mostly African-Americans living in flood prone lowland areas, many of whom were coerced into work fortifying breached levees. Engineers had only been thinking about preventing the sorts of floods they had seen before. To them, what happened in 1927 seemed a virtual impossibility. It hadn’t happened in a hundred years, after all.
I recently finished reading a book written by Dr. Lucy Jones, a former USGS seismologist, which talks about this very flood, as well as many other of the most infamous natural disasters in human history. From the 1755 Great Lisbon Earthquake to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, her book explores how these catastrophes shake to the very core our human belief we can ever understand or control the world around us.
Though the book provides a thorough scientific explanation accompanying each tragic episode, I took away from it not mainly the mechanism of how disasters occur, but rather how people react to and try to understand them. In looking at the pervasive patterns across these responses to calamity, I think we can learn a lot about human behavior.
While we may not be able to fully anticipate a disaster (some are more predictable than others), we do generally understand the distribution from which such events occur. The robust historical record, which stretches back at least a century in most cases, provides the relative frequency and variation in magnitude of earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and all other sorts of natural events. Moreover, the locations at which these events occur are far from random. Earthquakes happen on the fault lines between tectonic plates. A volcanic eruption only takes place where there is a volcano. As a result of this knowledge, we can understand a whole lot about these seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Looking at the data, we can say with reasonable confidence that the so-called “big one” will happen at some point in our lifetimes, even if we cannot predict exactly when.
Normalization Bias
So why then are we so surprised when it really happens? This, Dr. Jones suggests, is all a matter of perspective. Once-in-a-lifetime happenings are by definition something nobody living will have experienced before. They exist outside of anyone’s sense of the regular. She refers to this tendency to discount the likelihood of events unfamiliar to our direct experience as “normalization bias.” In other words, people assume what they have witnessed themselves can serve as a representative sample of how the world functions in general.
However, just because we have not experienced something firsthand, does not mean we should consider it outside the realm of possibility. The fact is that in the long view, earthquakes, pandemics and all sorts of catastrophic events, no matter how unprecedented they may seem through the present lens, occur on fairly regular intervals over broader time horizons. We discount the future possibility of that which we have not observed in the past. However, doing so hampers our ability to prepare for likely events, which is a grave mistake.
The fact is that in the long view, earthquakes, pandemics and all sorts of catastrophic events, no matter how unprecedented they may seem through the present lens, occur on fairly regular intervals over broader time horizons.
Immediate Gratification Overload
On a societal level, overemphasis on the short-term view is further compounded by the misaligned incentive structures of decision makers. Politicians worry about reelection. Why pursue a policy that might save hundreds of lives thirty years down the line over a less impactful one which provides results immediately? Many seemingly see their constituents as those who will vote in next month’s election, not the unborn children who will have to live out the decades-long result of their decisions. Even if leaders have some understanding of the bigger picture, pragmatic political concerns compete to draw their attention away from it.
Consider the current COVID-19 pandemic. Ignoring the various responses to the spread of the virus and focusing only on preparedness, few if any countries can claim that they were truly ready. Whether the severe deficits of personal protective equipment, underdeveloped guidelines for mitigation and social distancing, or widespread inadequate hospital capacity, a variety of pre-existing problems exacerbated the devastation of the virus as it began to spread. This is not to say that these problems were unidentified prior to January and February of this year. Health experts had been ringing the bell on these issues for years. Despite knowing exactly what it would take to be ready when a global pandemic inevitably struck, it appears that national governments largely refused to make doing so a priority
These examples illustrate what happens when we eschew long-term planning. We see it time and time again, this desire to kick the bucket down the road and hope consequences don’t land on us. When we constantly refuse to repair bridges until they lie on the verge of collapse though, sometimes they really do. It all boils down to a high-stakes game of hot potato with lives and livelihoods in the balance. Not only does this sort of approach rarely deliver the optimal result. It is also far from rational — that is, if we account for the potential for future suffering.
You may now be realizing that the applications of this principle are seemingly endless. Pre-empting a problem is often both less costly and more effective than responding once crisis has begun. Take climate change, an issue on which inaction now may only be felt years down the line. Companies and governments habitually choose the potential profits from pollution over implementing more sustainable practices. Preventative medicine and promoting a healthy lifestyle is almost always cheaper than treating disease once it presents. But the US alone spends billions on avoidable medical conditions and comparative peanuts on avoiding them. On an individual level, we may choose to procrastinate on some task or assignment in favor of another hour of mindless leisure. And we all know how that story goes.
Thinking More Broadly
So, how can we adopt a more long-term mindset, both in our personal life and in society more widely? To begin, I want to make clear that circumstances sometimes necessitate short-term thinking. Those worried about personal safety or getting food on the table do not have the luxury of planning far in advance. Moreover, an unexpected event can sometimes be the catalyst needed to bring an issue to light which has been previously overlooked. In this case, reactionary measures bring a level of change-making momentum that advanced planning simply cannot.
What I am talking about is not these cases. The issue arises when we have the privilege to act with the longer term in mind and choose not to. I have three ideas for how we can begin to address this harmful tendency. The full answer is in no doubt more complicated, and will require earnest research and reflection.
Owning Our Bias
First, confronting bias requires a recognition that it exists in the first place. Understanding that humans have an inclination to think in the short-term, as well as remembering the pitfalls that come with acting in such a way, may make it easier to resist this temptation. Consider the famous and perhaps overly cited 1972 Stanford marshmallow experiment, in which researchers gave children the choice between eating a single marshmallow right away, or two after a fifteen minute waiting period. In later follow-ups, those with the patience to wait for a second marshmallow enjoyed greater success further on in life, as measured by a variety of metrics. While some have disputed the premise of these findings in the years since, we can find numerous instances in our world showing the merits of delayed gratification. Contrasting this with the aforementioned examples, the irrationality of short-termism becomes clear.
Engaging the Past
Next, we must remember that short-term thinking is not just a matter of impatience, but also one of limited perspective. As such, historical awareness can serve as a vital antidote. The past harbors crucial context and parallels to help guide our reaction to events in our own times. We cannot make sense of George Floyd without understanding Rodney King or Emmett Till. If we see happenings in the world around us as one-offs, it becomes impossible to stop similar tragedies happening in the future. Rarely ever are things as simple as one self-contained event. The more we extend outside of our immediate experiences, the larger and more reliable the data set we have upon which to base our decisions. Strikingly, many of the issues grappled with by those in the past still play out today, and their words can provide insights for the present. Books, memoirs, speeches, and more — all of this information rests at our fingertips, yet engaging with it requires active choice. As we widen our frame of reference, we may begin to see long-term planning as preparation not for contingencies but for inevitabilities. Modern tragedies may become symptoms of historically-rooted, structural injustices. Our sense of helplessness may be overtaken by confidence in the awareness of what we do have the ability to control.
Daring to Be Kind
Lastly, we might all benefit from training our empathy and courage. Once we realize we can act in a way that benefits our future selves and others, we must then convince ourselves the worth of doing so. This requires opening our hearts and ears to the stories of those around us, as well as taking up the perhaps uncomfortable task of realistically imagining the future under current trajectories. In listening and providing a platform for the truth, even when doing so requires intense personal sacrifice, we touch into our core humanity and awaken a sense of responsibility to help those in need as best we are able. Then, with a newfound sense of urgency, we can shift the focus of conversation toward the interests of those whose voices do not travel to the bargaining table. We can hold accountable the leaders in our society, providing our own resolute demands as competing incentives to the allure of short-term gain. In this way, we start to correct a system that ignores both lurking and persistent problems, one built on the flawed premise that there will never be a bigger flood.
