A captivating guide... The Long View is simply crammed with interesting ideas. This is a beautifully turned, calmly persuasive but urgent book.’ Following their discussions in Sweden and afterwards, the Trajectories group concluded that the ‘status quo’ path would be a pretty unlikely scenario once you get to longer-term timescales. “Instead, civilisation is likely to either end catastrophically or expand dramatically,” they write.

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 In early September 2017, the world’s attention was focused on various pieces of salient news: Hurricane Irma was brewing in the Caribbean, Donald Trump’s administration had announced plans to dismantle an Obama-era immigration policy, and photographers captured Prince George’s first day at school.We have the innate ability, then, to imagine the consequences of our actions in deeper time, but sadly not always the will or the motivation to escape the salience of the present. For me, this begins with my daughter, Grace, imagining her path to the next century. She will be 86 years old in 2100. I find it remarkable to consider that there are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us – and when I do so, my sense of time and possibility opens up a little more. There are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us What I have learned is that the long view is about much more than escaping the traps of the present. Sometimes, it is a perspective that allows one to transcend the stresses of the moment. Other times, it offers guidance in periods of uncertainty. Often, it provides principles for understanding the world. But most of all, it is a way of seeing what matters most within the here and now. The long view, I believe, can make the present more meaningful. So, while it may well be true that we live in a period of crises, if we are to navigate our way through 2023 and beyond, it begins by changing the way we see time. Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk ‘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.’ Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan - home to some of the world's 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?

Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan – home to some of the world’s 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? Is it true? Certainly it is for people personally affected by conflict, poverty or loss. But for those who live in relative comfort – myself included – it’s less clear. I know that, for my part, the media I consume influences how I feel about myself and the world, whereas when my great-grandparents faced upheaval, they did not have to live in a 21st-century news environment with 24-hour feeds and daily doomscrolling. Humans are unique in their ability to understand time, able to comprehend the past and future like no other species. Yet modern-day technology and capitalism have supercharged our short-termist tendencies and trapped us in the present, at the mercy of reactive politics, quarterly business targets and 24-hour news cycles.

It is daunting to contemplate how we as individuals might act with kindness and foresight for unborn people. To realise that we are just one in a chain of generations, and accept that while we will one day be forgotten, we owe an ethical obligation to our descendants to leave a better world than the one we inherited ourselves. I find it is difficult enough extrapolating how my small acts as an individual might affect the wider world and its population today, let alone hundreds of years into the future. Catastrophe trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilisation. The philosophical argument for investing in measures to protect the wellbeing of future generations can also be framed, simplistically, by imagining a set of scales, with everybody alive today on one side, and every unborn person on the other. Today’s population of 7.7 billion is a lot – but it is small when you weigh it against everybody on Earth who will ever call themselves human, along with all their achievements. If Homo sapiens (or the species we evolve into) endures for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, that becomes a humongous number of lives to consider. Trillions of families, relationships, births; countless moments of potential joy, love, friendship and tenderness.

And so, I thought, this is where I can start: as a parent. As my daughter grows up, what I am sure I can do is try my hardest to widen the horizons, empathy and potential of a little girl who can’t yet imagine a world beyond life as a 10-year-old. A girl who will become a teenager, an adult, a grandmother, my closest descendant in a chain of generations, who, just maybe, will live long enough to watch the start of the 22nd Century unfold. 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 More and more,” he would write in his notebook, “I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.” I experienced a brief moment of clarity, though, when sitting with my daughter at breakfast recently. As five-year-olds do, she often asks questions. We got talking about what I had been writing.Some philosophers have reasoned that discounting the needs of our descendants is akin to burying a shard of broken glass in a forest. If a child steps on the glass and cuts themselves today or tomorrow, then a discount rate suggests this injury is much worse than a child hurting themselves on the glass a century from now. But ethically, there is no difference between the two.