Short-termism, Metanarratives and the History Manifesto
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 26 янв 2025
- I look at short-termism in business, politics, and academia. In the History Manifesto, historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage argue for a return to long term thinking to help us deal creatively with issues like Climate Change and global inequality. The type of history they advocate for is one that draws inspiration from Fernand Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean over the long duree and the Annales School. They also look at how big data is revolutionizing history departments. I also look at stock buybacks and select committees.
Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: patreon.com/use...
Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos:
www.paypal.com...
Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel:
amzn.to/2ykJe6L
Follow me on:
Facebook: thethenan...
Instagram: / thethenandnow
Twitter: / lewlewwaller
Sources:
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto, aeon.co/essays...
Dambisa Moyo, Why Democracy Doesn’t Deliver, foreignpolicy....
Ian Marsh, How Contemporary Politics Became Trapped in the Short Term and How it Can be Repaired, blogs.lse.ac.uk...
William Galston, Against Short-Termism, democracyjourn...
Ian Goldin & Pascal Lamy (2014) Overcoming Short-Termism: A Pathway for Global Progress, The Washington Quarterly, 37:2, 7-24, DOI: 10.1080/0163660X.2014.926205
Jo Guildi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto, www.cambridge....
Credits:
Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from www.videvo.net
Bracha L. Ettinger [CC BY-SA 2.5 (creativecommon...)]
commons.wikime...
Sue Gardner [CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommon...)], from Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikime...
Virtues Inherited, Vices Passed On by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attrib-ution licence (creativecommon...)
Source: chriszabriskie....
Artist: chriszabriskie....
This is probably the best RUclips channel..
I hope you never stop finding the motivation to produce these videos. I am indebted to you for these videos man.
Really great storytelling in this video particularly!
Really remarkable analysis, amazing job! THEN&NOW is one of the best channels on RUclips!
Truly great! I've got a huge project which I have to start soon and I had somewhat of an Idea of what I waned to do, but still, I felt there was something missing. Well, I've found it! Thanks.
was that abrupt ending intentional?
isn't long-sightedness/termism to some extent opposite to Lyotard's 'Replacing grand, universal narratives with small, local narratives'?
if long termism was a grand narrative it would be .... but is thinking long term a grand narrative ?
The grand narrative seems to be, as I understand it, a dogmatic and unmoving view of society and the world, it claims knowledge of how things are. Think the postmodern philosophers who were once marxist often pointed to this when they turned against Marxism...
It's an interesting area ... I tend to see it as intersting view to explore, rather than a philosophy to believe... in fact the latter seems to go against much of the foundational concepts of postmoderism and critical theory. In many aspects is is actually sort of simple, accepting that how we see anything, record and view history, is built on a base of assumptions and un examined views that are there deeply, so deeply, we don't examine them and so make calculations and form views without examining the basis of out thoughts, our start point ... most simply, to me, it seems to be seriously questioning things we don't question... before we move onto making any analysis or judgement... to get out of monty python-esque circular thinking.
Just seriously examining it now.... Chomsky has pointed to a lot of what is put forward about base assumptions and narratives setting out reality and so the lens with which we view that reality is set by the very reality we are looking at ... he has pointed out, that this perception is not new and in fact a long standing part of philosophical to scientific thought.
Mark Fishers „slow cancellation of the future“ is another example of a similar diagnosis.
Wonderful video! A really timely look at how paralysing the consequences of postmodernism can be( that's not to say I disagree with the venture entirely of course, a lot of good has come from the movement). Looking at it through the lens of instant gratification and short-term thinking really makes things a lot clearer. Thank you!
Wonderful video. This is so true and your vision is indeed inspiring!
very important message. worth spreading. donated.
I've heard a sociologist talking about the necessity of introducing a form of taxation for short-term risky investment behaviour, saying that this is a destabilizing factor for economy, society and the ecosystem. Medium to long term investment is the backbone of safe sturdy civilization.
rares mircea isn't the risk a form of tax?
@@bob_is_online Yes, you can certainly look at it like that. But it's like saying ”The terrorist playing with explosive materials is exposing himself to enough risk and stress, why should society try to persecute the poor fellow further?” Humans, be they poor uneducated gang members or sophisticated Wall Street investors, are set in motion by the same basic drives, intuitions and biases. The Nobel price laureate Daniel Kahneman said that even though he spent a lifetime discovering and investigating human biases, he's nonetheless very susceptible to those biases himself. Now, think about all those billionaires around the world who decide where the money (the life-blood of civilization) are gonna be injected. If they see that pouring money into cutting the Amazon forest is getting them twice the profit than pouring them into PTSD treatment research, than the Amazon's fate is set.
This was among the top 10 most interesting articles and essays i've ever read and it's precisely about this subject - medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1
@@raresmircea that's an interesting way of thinking about risk.
I'm an investment professional and I can say that risk is quite leaky thing. It's hard to define and predict therefore making it almost impossible to control even for the most sophisticated teams of professionals. Once you start thinking about restricting such vague concept there's no going back. For example, you may drive a car and see no serious risks but million of people die every year. Is it high risk? Is smoking high risk?
After all when you buy a stock you bear the same kind of risk. If you start punishing investments with money, why not enforce absence of belts in car seats just to illustrate how dangerous it is to drive one? With due respect, does it sound like a good solution to you?
@@alexikensen Alex Ikon That person was talking about introducing a tax (NOT incentive) on short term investments. So, it was all about "wearing seatbelts" (to continue on your metaphor), following driving regulations and paying fines for breaking said safety measures.
Also, I agree with you, risk is a vague concept (what are the exact combinations and quantities of factors that can be regarded as risky?; what is the damage considered as unacceptable?).. just as it is in auto traffic and everything else. This is why whenever authorities make rules of conduct they must make them to their best assumptions. No set of rules in the world is an absolute/ideal set, so why ask "the impossible" to apply here? :)
@@raresmircea maybe I didn't get it quite clearly. In my opinion, a tax is nothing but an incentive to reduce a harmful behaviour. Even if you consider it as inflow for government resources to mitigate an accident, it still serves as an incentive in the first place. Furthermore, you don't pay more taxes if there are more accidents, so the relation between the accident recovery and a tax is a bit broken.
I want to stress it again and draw the connection between road conditions and investment markets -- neither of them is reliably predictable. That fact makes blunt regulations to be annoying and ineffective at best.
Our example: Taxing of short term investments will obviously reduce the usage of it and will lead to decrease of money mass available to everyone. That would result in inability to borrow (basically the same thing as investment but from the side of a money receiver) for shorter periods causing massive number of (personal and corporate) bankruptcies throughout the whole system due to tiny problems with cashflow. It obviously doesn't increase "safety" on the market as you may imagine. The idea is that short term investments or derivatives or any other financial instrument is not the cause of disaster (as they can both act as a seat belt or deadly weapon), poorly designed systems are.
So, the same would happen if you strip (or tax) drivers from the seat belts -- casual problems would result in often fatal disaster.
My only point that the regulation is not a subject for easy patches and fixes (due to a large number of people's lives at stake) but the careful and well-thought redesign of an economic system. Let's treat it this way for our own good.
Wait a minute. You mentioned Braudel as the inspiration for the Annales school. While very important (I'm in fact re-reading his work on the Mediterranean), he wasn't the pioneer. The origin of Annales start with Marc Bloch and Lucién Febvre, in the early 20th century. Precursors included the Chilean historian Vicuña Mackenna in the late 19th century.
Everyone's dreams of the future will clash like sparks meeting wood
Surely an all encompassing account would also be concerned with eschatological matters.
That too....... Evolutionary psychology, and other topic specific, should be a way to develop a postmodern meta narrative to combat this short-termism. The only problem it is really difficult to get a high quality cross disciplinary outcome as the depth of knowledge is so great.
Thanks for the video
Just found your channel, and it is like giving a glass of water to someone who is in hell.
Great work. 🤜🤛
Fantastic!!
.THANKS.
But I REALLY AM a servant of higher truth. Trust me. 😁
yeowch