Frontpaged in the NY Times today in an article by William J. Broad and Cornelia Dean is a comparison of the two presidential candidates’ plans for renewing the United States as an innovation economy. Assuming that Obama will win the election, I think it is safe to say that America will return to a deep and long term investment in science education, and in direct investment in the kind of long-term research that most corporations eschew in favor of research that offers benefits in the near-term.

Shortermism is the enemy of innovation. It might even be the enemy of civilization.What is shortermism?

When investors demand that management improve quarterly results, the ruin of many organizations becomes inevitable (see an older article on this blog about shareholder rights vs stockholder rights in the case of Yahoo!) When we instigate term limits on our president or our representatives, we guarantee that they will no longer be held accountable in the long term. When we test our elementary students incessantly to measure short-term performance, it is no surprise we will be asking teachers to educate our young people, which is our real nation’s treasure, for successful testing as opposed to successful thinking.

Shortermism is the kind of thinking that sends a large part of the population to the emergency room for expensive medical care, when a few cents of prevention through a rational health care system would have prevented an illness from ever having occurred. Shortermism is poor zoning, where a larger sign here, overhead wires there, an exception for a strip mall there, often in the name a few more tax dollars right now, often results in the decimation of entire neighborhoods, and long-term financial devastation for the community.

Gregory Bateson tells the story about the roof beams of the dining hall at New College, Oxford, built in the late fifteen hundreds. The oak beams were massive, some eighteen inches square, and more than twenty feet long.

An entomologist had poked into the beams with his penknife and discovered they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in dismay. Where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays?

One of the Junior Fellows suggested there might be some oak on the College lands, part of the endowment and scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.

The forester pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

It was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams, in the end, always become beetly. This plan had been passed down from one forester to the next for four hundred years. Bateson reports the forester as saying,” You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College hall.”

In a wise society, we would understand as a people that every problem has at least one, but probably more, time domains which need to be taken in consideration. When we think about building a new school, we need to think not only about the time and cost to build the school, but also its entire expected life, the inevitable maintenance that will be required along the way, and the eventual cost of replacement. Each of these phases would be part of our short and long term planning, and we would budget and provide for them from the inception of the project. The same for our bridges, our highways, our airports. All need to be constantly repaired, updated, inspected and eventually replaced.

Have you ever wondered why things get “run down?” It’s as if when we build something we ignore the idea that we’re going to need to paint it from time to time, or replace the carpeting, or fix the roof. The reality is that everything requires maintenance from the moment it’s completed. Knowing that, why do we suddenly discover public buildings that have been neglected, and that require huge rescues? Is it that the easiest thing to delete from a budget is maintenance? Is that why our cities are often vast areas of ruin and decline? Maybe the option to defer maintenance should be made illegal. How much deferred maintenance would be about right for the next airplane you might board? Something funny about that fuel pump, but I guess it can wait?

Shortermism which has resulted in our failure to invest in all the elements of innovation — education, research and development in corporations, government sponsored big science — is in effect the deferred maintenance of the engine of prosperity of our country. When we think about what an education must do for a person, if we were to think about this for the long term, we would be able to consider whether just giving someone a skill would be enough to prepare them for a lifetime full of surprising and unforeseeable change. What does an education really need to do for the long term of a human life? It seems to me we might want to focus on the skills that are the basis of a lifetime of learning. The minimum requirements for an education would be learning how to learn. Once someone knows that, they can do anything.

Develop a heightened sensitivity to shortermism. When someone demands better short term results without worrying about the consequences in the long term, be very worried. When bonuses and compensation and other rewards are based on shortermism, be aware that destruction lies just around the corner. With every plan, we need to ask, “What is the impact now, and in five years and even twenty-five years?”

John Maynard Keynes famously said, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” That’s true, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be building our society for our ever-longer lives, as well as for our children and our children’s children. What greater legacy could we create than a society that knows when to plant a forest, and has the wisdom to refrain from harvesting it for a few centuries?