Political Choices Fail the Test of Real Time

Moving part of the cost of the savings-and-loan bailout “off budget” will cost taxpayers additional billions. But because the maneuver helps keep federal spending within Gramm-Rudman limits, our political decision-makers will take bows for their discipline in not adding to the deficit.

This farce only dramatizes what lies at the very heart of our inability as a society to fulfill our essential responsibilities to ourselves and our children’s future, not to mention the natural world we are blessed to inhabit. In one sense, the problem is simple: We face (but choose not to confront) a profound disjuncture between political time, economic time and ecological time. The time frame in which our political decision-makers must answer to us, the citizenry--political time--is out of sync with real-world time--the time it takes to reap the consequences of today’s choices.

Political time is as short as the two to six years between elections. Economic time can be much longer. For example, obtaining approval for a new city transit system might be a two-year task in political time. Bringing the system from concept to reality could easily take 20 years, spanning the tenure of dozens of elected officials.

Economic time can be as long as it takes human beings to develop and contribute to society. The cost of investment in one young person’s development could include nutritional support for the infant, preschool education, tutoring and a subsidized summer job for the teen-ager and education at a public university. All this comes to about $40,000 (in today’s dollars). The invisible net social gain from such investment is suggested by a negative $40,000 price tag: the cost of keeping one inmate imprisoned for just 17 months. But in part because we have no way to incorporate the gains from social involvement into our budget, we reap instead the heavier costs of social abandonment.

Economic time can also be much shorter than political time. It can be as short as a corporation’s fiscal quarter, to which many executive fates are bound. It can be as brief as the split second it takes a speculator to shift from dollars to yen in international currency markets. Such foreshortened time frames play havoc with economic planning by political decision-makers.

If political time and economic time can be measured in seconds or years, ecological time is measured in lifetimes, generations, even millenniums. Carcinogens entering the environment today will cause cancer 25 years from now. Nature needs 100 years to build just one inch of topsoil, an amount lost in a few years of poor farming practices encouraged by national policy decisions. It would take decades for the damaged ozone layer to recover if release of all chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals were halted now. Yet this seems like no time at all when compared to the millions of years nature needs to defuse the radioactive wastes we are now burying.

Clearly, we cannot make responsible decisions about the savings-and-loan crisis, acid rain, day-care needs or the Stealth bomber unless we devise means to reconcile these widely divergent time frames.

Surely, with today’s sophisticated computers we have the capacity to estimate costs and gains over extended, varied time frames. Devising such systems could put to good use all the energy that economists now expend manipulating and debating ever more complex and largely irrelevant econometric formulas.

Devising alternative planning tools, however, is not our basic problem. It is how to make the real costs--measured over human, economic and ecological time--visible and thus accessible for public deliberation; how to use this information to enable citizens to judge the wisdom of political decisions we’re making today.

To congratulate our political leaders for, say, staying within Gramm-Rudman is myopia of the most deadly sort. It’s tantamount to priding ourselves for meeting the mortgage payment by selling the foundation to our home. We must learn to live within real time--the real time between economic investment and return, the real time of human development, the real time of nature itself. As citizens we must work to make the artificially brief time span of political life accountable to longer time frames. Let’s stop congratulating our political leaders for solving problems within their tenure that our children will have to pay for in their real time.