In 2015, the small town of Yahaba, Japan had to decide whether to raise taxes to fix its decaying water infrastructure. The town had been deadlocked over the decision for some time. Then they tried an imaginative exercise.
In the exercise, residents put on ceremonial yellow robes and were asked to imagine themselves as residents of Yahaba in the year 2060. They were told that they had to deal with a water sustainability crisis because the infrastructure had been neglected for so long. Struck by the vividness of this vision, the townspeople voted to raise taxes by 6%, enough to cover the cost of a new, robust water supply. This exercise led to the creation of Future Design workshops, which are now used worldwide.
We invest in our children but that tends to be the limit of our investment in future generations. It is difficult for us to care about something not immediately in front of us. Policymaking is similarly short-sighted. While science has told us about global warming since the late-1980s, it has taken a generation to fully acknowledge it, and even now resistance persists. This lack of concern over the future extends to hurricane and pandemic preparation as well. If one could envision the world at the end of the century, some hard decisions that need to be made are more likely to be made. That is the goal of World Leadership: to inform people of tomorrow’s world so we can make better decisions today.
Last week, NASA used a rocket to nudge an asteroid’s orbit. This proof-of-concept may eventually lead to a life-preserving defense against an asteroid hitting the earth. NASA, however, is one of the few examples of future planning by our government. (An agency chartered to do this type of planning, the Office of Technology Assessment, was defunded in 1995.) We’ve entered into a period where the future can no longer be ignored: it arrives too quickly. We need to build the institutions and tools that help us plan for tomorrow, while we solve the problems of today.
Source:
William Askill and Tyler John, “Want Politics to be Better? Focus on Future Generations, Washington Post, B4, 26 September 2022; see also https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/16/future-design-yahaba-politics/
Photo: Masaaki Takahashi and Ritsuji Yoshioka
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