The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [74]
The sad truth about Washington today is that we lack serious institutions charged with carrying out systematic planning for the future. The Office of Management and Budget prepares federal budget proposals one year at a time. The U.S. Treasury has little capacity or mandate to undertake long-term economic strategy. There is no coordinating agency for public investments by the federal government, nor is there a planning agency, as in many other countries. Each department or agency manages the specific investment projects under its particular jurisdiction. Issues such as energy, climate, water, demographic change, and so forth are either neglected or chopped up into the work of several different parts of the government.
The United States has several important agencies that undertake high-quality analysis of global trends. The National Intelligence Council has prepared important studies about the global challenges that will face the United States to the year 2025, most notably Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, in 2008.13 The findings were stark, suggesting that
Climate change is likely to exacerbate resource scarcities.
Demand is likely to outstrip easily available supplies (of strategic resources, including energy, food, and water) over the next decade or so.
Lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching critical proportions.
The above trends suggest major discontinuities, shocks, and surprises.
What is most alarming, though, is that the government made such dire forecasts without recognizing the need for substantive policy responses. The alarm bells were sounded, but nobody responded and nobody seems to care.
This is an increasingly common pattern. Careful work is carried out by countless agencies and scientific academies, including the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as leading research universities and think tanks. Yet the studies are ignored as soon as they are issued. Expertise is ignored, and the agenda in Washington remains dominated by what is convenient for politicians and the interest groups that support them. Difficult issues, such as climate change, water scarcity, and the transition of energy from fossil fuels, are kicked down the road to later years.
A new mindfulness of the future would take seriously the responsibility to link expert forecasts with appropriate policy actions. The government would be charged with regular reporting on the main future national challenges, with a time horizon of ten to twenty years. Such reports, by the National Intelligence Council or other agencies, would then be discussed and debated by the president and Congress. The White House would be required to issue a policy paper in response, and Congress would be charged with taking up that policy paper. A cycle of deliberation and policy design would ensue, and the future would be viewed with the moral and political seriousness that it requires.
Politics as Moral Responsibility
Mindfulness of politics is needed to provide an antidote to the dead end of corporatocracy. Americans must regain a proper understanding of the complementary and balanced roles of government and the marketplace. Though we support the crucial role of private businesses in the market economy, we must also insist that powerful corporations stop their relentless lobbying and propagandizing so that society can address serious problems on the basis of evidence, ethics, and long-term plans.
Our politics will work again when we overcome three crises. The first is ideological, the mistaken belief that free markets alone can solve