Description

A wideranging and thoughtprovoking exploration of the importance of longterm thinking

Humans are unique in our ability to understand time able to comprehend the past and future like no other species Yet modernday technology and capitalism have supercharged our shorttermist tendencies and trapped us in the present at the mercy of reactive politics quarterly business targets and 24hour news cycles

It wasnt always so In medieval times craftsmen worked on cathedrals that would be unfinished in their lifetime Indigenous leaders fostered intergenerational reciprocity And in the early twentieth century writers dreamed of worlds thousands of years hence Now as we face longterm challenges on an unprecedented scale how do we recapture that farsighted vision

Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan home to some of the worlds oldest businesses to an Australian laboratory where an experiment started a century ago is still going strong He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy technology science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born

Praise for The Long View

A wise humane book laced with curiosity and hope It will open your mind and horizons and leave you giddy at the prospect of all that we may yet become Tom Chatfield author of How to Think

Hopefilled and revelatory Beautifully readable and scholarly rich and personal this book shows how to leave a robust legacy for the future we need to overcome our bias for the present Rowan Hooper author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

A soaring hymn to all that might lie in the future alongside the diverse and beautiful ways to think about it Overflowing with wisdom and insight Thomas Moynihan author of XRisk

Few books can claim to shake your perspective on life but The Long View does exactly that a landmark book that could help to build a much brighter future for many generations to come David Robson author of The Expectation Effect

The Long View is a manifesto calling for a radical reconception of our relationship with time Richard Fisher documents the social psychological and economic reasons we have become stranded on the Island of Now and charts routes for us to get back to the mainland Marcia Bjornerud the author of Timefulness

P 2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd