We already have a Department for the Future

“The Department of the Future would set in motion a realignment of priorities in all aspects of society,” proposes geology professor Marcia Bjornerud in her compelling book Timefulness. “Resource conservation would again become a core value and patriotic virtue. Tax incentives and subsidies would be rebalanced to reward long-term stewardship over short-term exploitation.”

We already have such a Department for the Future. It’s called that capitalist free market out there.

For example, which organisations have the longest planning timelines? It’s not governments, run as they are by politicians whose horizons extend just beyond the next press conference all the way to the next election. It’s almost certainly the oil and mining companies who regularly plan and make 50 year investments - that’s their planning horizon.

We can also approach this another way, the current value of an organisation is the net present value of all future income streams from it. In capital markets concentration upon short term gains is also known as capital destruction and valuations do fall as a result.

Perhaps the only human institution that plans longer term than corporations is the family. By a likely time of death these days one might well have met one’s own great grandchild - a pretty direct link to thinking about another 80 years into the future when they’re likely to still be going.

But say that this isn’t enough, that we must reorder society once again to gain that longer term view. That means the abolition of inheritance taxation. Remove economic resources from that terribly short term politics and retain it in the human institution with the longest planning horizon. We can even test this. The Ottoman Empire had, over large economic resources at least, effectively a 100% inheritance tax. Everything belonged to the Sultan and those lifelong leases granted to pashas and deys and viziers reverted upon their death. This is not a system which, to put it mildly, led to economic vibrancy over those generations.

That is, even if we were to think we should have a department of the future we’d not then locate it in government, our most short term institution of all.