This is an amazing oped:
The pandemic was a brutal example of Canada’s chronic inability to plan for the worst. When Ottawa finally got around to releasing a report last October about how the various levels of government had handled the crisis, the report’s authors pointed out that its recommendations closely mirrored those in an exhaustive report on the 2003 SARS outbreak in Ontario, which in turn had closely mirrored a 1993 report on the HIV epidemic.
That same inability to focus on issues that don’t provide instant political gratification is exacerbating the threats coming from the Trump White House. The tariffs are all the more potent when applied to a Canadian economy that
Ottawa and provinces have been happy to coast on the fumes of North American free trade, never imagining this might come back to haunt the country.
Politicians of all stripes have repeatedly ignored calls to make the country more competitive and increase its productivity. That includes tearing down the ludicrous interprovincial trade barriers that have been shaving points off of Canada’s gross domestic product for decades.
…
And why? Because it’s easier to sell Canadians on immediate largesse the year before an election than it is to convince them of the need for long-term investments that will cost billions and may not be needed for years, or even decades.
Federal politicians of all stripes are guilty of this. We haven’t seen a serious response to climate change, the housing crisis, or Canada’s collapsing productivity. We get weird bandaids (immigration to pump the GDP/workforce, reducing GST on property purchases), but rarely do we see well thought out plans with multi party support.
Original: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-lesson-that-politicians-never-learn/
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Politicians of all stripes have repeatedly ignored calls to make the country more competitive and increase its productivity.
Oh come the fuck on. They just couldn’t resist taking a swipe at labour, how true to form.
Sorry the government didn’t bend and spread widely enough for capital, G&M.
I don’t think productivity has to be in opposition to labour and employee quality of life (I’m not sure how else to describe it).
Unfortunately, I don’t see this changing in time to prepare for a huge upcoming change in the form of AI + humanoid robots putting hundreds of millions or billions of people out of work. AI+bots will be a gigantic tech improvement and could improve things by a huge amount very rapidly, but by essentially doing NOTHING to prepare for the unemployment, it will likely be a disaster that certainly does not HAVE to occur.
How politicians just ignore this worst case scenario is super frustrating. It’s hard to imagine most countries being able to pivot their entire approach to keeping their citizens alive, not to mention just ‘not miserable’ fast enough, if they keep on doing nothing for a few more years. It’s mind boggling that somehow they don’t realize how fast this change will occur compared to previous seismic shifts. They must have advisors who are supposed to bring up important issues, I would think.
I guess politicians simply don’t want massive rapid change to happen, to such an extent that it always seems best to them to just pay attention to the short term gratification. I wish they would accept that it’s not up them whether massive changes occur or not.
This is certainly a political trait, but perhaps more importantly, it’s a human one.
Immediate gratification feels better than distant gratification. Avoiding something bad never feels as good as getting something good.
I don’t know what the solution is. Education, I guess? The population at large needs to fully understand the nature of the threats, and the consequences of failure.
We’ve become a society of instant gratification, to the point where having to wait a week for an online delivery feels like a hardship!
I dont know the solution either. As individuals we can try to not chose the “easy” over the “good”, allow ourselves a little bit of discomfort for the better good. Learn to live a little bit slower. I don’t know how to translate that to a whole society.
Just my $0.02 to add, I guess.
It’s quite hard indeed, especially given that the current, dominant North American culture is one seeped in a high degree of hedonism. We don’t typically hear stories of how people endured decades-long of hard work and inconveniences to achieve something significant. I know they exist; I’ve talked to a good number of people to know they do, but we just don’t all hear them in a manner where it’s broadcasted.
In East Asia, there are many such stories that go around, even as stories for children. The narrative around education itself is molded by it; study hard and well, and you’ll most likely end up with a good job, which means potential for a good and comfortable life. Outside of education, certain tv shows like to go into stories that span multiple years that shows the struggles humans go through in their lives, and how they will be rewarded or punished by their earlier actions. Take the Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Filipino dramas that span literally hundreds or even thousands of 30-to-45-minute episodes, some of which are still ongoing.
That said though, Western culture has taken a strong hold of the younger demographic in East Asia, so instant gratification is also a growing problem there.
While I don’t think East Asian culture sets itself out to dissuade people of self-gratification, it sets up people’s expectations of the different kinds of gratification you can get through life, some of which clearly require years to attain.
And I don’t think people don’t really know of it here either. We understand that teaching can be a very rewarding career, not in terms of how much you’d make, but that we’d better the lives of the young, and it may lead to them carrying that torch and passing it forward. It’s also slightly more tangibly rewarding when old students come see you years down the road and thank you for teaching and guiding them. These are stories that can be told, and they can stick because they’re touching, human stories.
So yeah, I’m not sure how we can actually tell people that we shouldn’t just focus on instant gratification, in a society where it’s so deeply engrained into their psyche. It would be quite the fundamental shift in culture. I think there are steps we can take, eg via education and messaging through mediums like entertainment and the news.
