On Self-Interest for the Long Term: In a December 2023 Harris Poll, as reported by Axios, “63% of Americans rate their current financial situation as being "good," including 19% of us who say it's "very good." …. “Americans' outlooks for the future are also rosy. 66% think that 2024 will be better than 2023, and 85% of us feel we could change our personal financial situation for the better this year.”… “That's in line with Wall Street estimates, which have penciled in continued growth in both GDP and real wages for the rest of the year.” Other polling indicates that inflation, particularly food and gas prices, are fueling a negative view of the economy. These results point to a deeper problem with what we want and what we expect.
If a majority of people feel they are financially okay, and actually are positive about their situation going forward, yet are distressed about the immediate costs of one economic well-being factor, it indicates both a short-term viewpoint and an unwillingness to take any financial bump in the road. We would expect that those who are struggling, and for whom a larger grocery or gas bill can put them under, would be negative. What we have here are people who have absorbed the inflationary pressure and aren’t sweating it. This means that to satisfy us, our political leadership has to produce an economy in which every single factor that impacts the family budget, must be on an upward trend. That’s a wonderful objective, but everyone should know that our economy has never done that. One factor going up, takes another down. That’s the cold hard facts of it.
The other troubling piece of this situation is the focus on the here and now. We’re told that people aren’t “feeling” longer term efforts to rebuild our industrial/manufacturing might, address climate change in a win-win way, find more effective ways for the criminal justice system to provide security and equity, fix our neglected infrastructure, deal with the migration pressures at the border or build more robust global alliances. We don’t seem to appreciate anything that doesn’t immediately fix a problem or address a challenge. Yet almost all of the significant progress in our history evolved over years of trial and error, and the necessary changes in our own views, that allowed this progress to become acceptable. These too are the cold hard facts of it.
We need to ask ourselves two questions. #1. To be viewed as positive, does every policy and impact have to be a gain for each of us personally? #2. Does every policy have to provide immediate results? Polling says that’s the reality of America today. Dwell on the negatives and what have you done for me lately.
You’ll say this is partisan, but historic economic numbers bear it out. One Party runs the economy off the rails. Then we put the other Party into power and they get it back on its feet. Then we turn it over to the economic scoundrels again. This would say that we only endure difficult solutions and longer-term fixes for as long as we think we have to, and then happy days are here again.
I’ve been around long enough to know that self-interest drives both the political and economic world we live in. The issue here to see our longer-term self-interest over the daily events in our lives. Since a totally short-term view precludes addressing any challenge that requires long-term efforts, we are defeating ourselves. We’re not alone on this earth and to the extent that other societies are reaching for the future, we are being left behind. We can be absolutely certain that as we slip into second-world status, we will cast about for how we were cheated or misunderstood. Our belief in ourselves is so high that it won’t occur to most of us that we’ve committed a series of acts of self-sabotage. Should any brave soul dare voice that thought, plenty of Pied Pipers will drown out that self-awareness.
A healthier approach would be to see that those truly struggling are kept from drowning. The rest of us, who can absorb these inevitable bumps, need to buck up and get real. We also need to adopt a much more supportive attitude toward efforts to address complex challenges that have an extended solution timeline. In other words, adopt a balanced and larger-picture view of our world and our situations. It wouldn’t hurt to cast off those who prey on the few difficulties while staying silent on any progress that is being made. We need to be on guard for those who say they can fix things in a day or week. We’re a nation of 332 million people with a land mass of 3.8 million square miles. You don’t turn that ship around on a dime.
A great deal of the world still looks to us for leadership. We can chart progress for ourselves and everyone spinning around this planet with us. Our self-centeredness, in the face of the fact that we are doing better than just about every other nation economically, is dimming our leadership light. We can change that by lifting our eyes, accepting that not everything can be rosy and picking back up that can-do spirit that has been our ticket to solving problems, for better than two centuries.
ihg 3-1-2024 If you like these commentaries, join my blog for free at: https://ikegittlen.substack.com/ and share. Let’s see what we can build together.
Excellent. Reposted!