Roman Krznaric says humanity is doing terribly as good ancestors, arguing people have colonised the future as a dumping ground for ecological damage and technological risk.
Krznaric says humans are capable of long-term planning, citing London's Great Stink response, where Joseph Bazalgette built sewers twice as large as needed and they still serve the city.
Krznaric warns that long-term thinking alone is not enough, citing Hitler's thousand-year Reich, and urges leaders to weigh near-term security against long-term investments like tidal power.
Philosopher says humans can think long-term when prompted to
Humans can plan across centuries, yet modern society treats the future as a place to dump problems. Roman Krznaric argues that asking what kind of ancestor each person will be makes responsibility personal, and that tools like imagining future residents switch long-term thinking on. Long-term thinking only counts as good when it also serves people alive today.
Takeaways
Humanity is doing terribly as an ancestor. Krznaric says people have colonised the future, treating it as an outpost for ecological damage and technological risk. His examples are the 1945 atomic test, poor pandemic planning, inherited injustice, synthetic biology, and a projected one-third fall in food production space by 2100.
The ancestor framing makes responsibility personal. Krznaric prefers it to talk of future generations because it asks what each person does today. The scale is large. About 8bn people are alive, roughly 100bn have lived in 50,000 years, and nearly 7tn could follow.
Short-termism sits beside real long-term capacity. The marshmallow brain wants instant gratification, while the acorn brain, only a couple of million years old, plans ahead. Cathedral builders worked on projects they would never see finished, so Krznaric argues long-term thinking can be switched on.
Crisis and vision have produced lasting projects. After the Great Stink of 1858, Bazalgette led 22,000 workers over 19 years and built London sewers twice as large as needed, still in service. The James Webb telescope took 30 years, and the Svalbard seed vault is designed to last a thousand years.
Imagining future residents changes decisions. In Japan's future design movement, participants in orange kimonos play residents from 2060. They propose more transformative town plans and vote for higher local water taxes. Fujitsu and the Japanese Ministry of Finance use the method.
The idea is spreading into law and governance. Pakistan's Supreme Court cited The Good Ancestor when restricting cement expansion, and Frans Timmermans framed the European Green Deal in its terms. Some companies give future generations or nature a legal seat on their boards.
Long-term thinking alone is not enough. Krznaric cites Hitler's thousand-year Reich and Gus Levy's remark that people are long-term greedy. Security against Putin competes with investments like tidal power, yet Derek Walker says well-designed policy serves today and tomorrow, as renewable energy does.
Krznaric's own path
In the early 2000s he left academic political science to work in an Oxford college garden for £6.31 an hour.
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On this episode 3
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He cut back on flying around 2005.
A conversation with Alan Heumann, an Oxford-educated homeless man, taught him to step into other people's shoes.
He says people are embedded in five generations spanning about 200 years, and are a mixture of the serpent and the dove.