When Civilization Stops Building for Tomorrow

What do the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Buddhist reliquary monument Jetavanaramaya, and the Great Wall of China have in common? Their builders began them knowing they would never live to see them finished.

Completion wasn’t the point for the leaders who commissioned their construction. They were building a legacy. Rulers throughout history have focused on long-term growth, working to build empires they could pass on to their children.

This desire to build something that would outlast oneself and help the next generation was not confined to palaces. Artists worked for permanence; farmers and artisans passed down skills and property; estates and even grave markers assumed a future audience. There was a clear readiness to incur costs in the present for benefits that would arrive later, sometimes after one’s own lifetime.

Fast-forward to today. Some of these habits persist. Most parents still want their children to live a better life than they did. Especially within families, sacrifices are made to help the young.

Outside the family, however, the horizon often collapses. Modern art rarely aims at permanence or proportion. Modern buildings seldom invite comparison with older ones.

Modern officeholders rarely think beyond the next election: Many retirement systems are on the brink of collapse, a situation that has been foreseeable for decades. Large companies are bailed out, preventing the market from reallocating resources to those who can use them better.

This tilt toward the present is dangerous for the individual and for civilization at large. We can observe the pattern in culture and policy.

Protecting the Elderly

The Austrian school of economics refers to this phenomenon as time preference. High time preference—also called future discounting, present bias, or short-termism—means valuing today much more than tomorrow. A person with low time preferences, by contrast, sacrifices present satisfaction in favor of patient efforts toward a better future.

In modern civilizations, time preference is higher than it was in the past. One example is seen in the durability of goods. Due to a combination of inferior materials and various government regulations, the lifespan of the average appliance continues to shorten. Increased complexity renders repairs more difficult or prohibitively expensive; accordingly, many consumers are now opting for replacement over repair.

We also see this change in how societies value the young. Historically, civilizations had a strong tendency to prioritize the next generation. “Women and children first” was the motto when ships sank. When Britain was forced to ration food during the Second World War, children were prioritized.

During COVID times, politicians did the exact opposite: Most policies were designed to sacrifice the young for the old. It was clear early on that the virus posed little risk of severe illness to young, healthy people. To quote a meta-analysis published in early July 2020: “The prevalence of severe or critical illness [among children] was almost 0%.” Still, politicians kept schools closed or heavily restricted.

Although these policies did little to protect the old, they did succeed in sacrificing the young. While PISA test scores have been declining for a decade, a sharp decline is especially evident between 2018 and 2022. Students lost substantial learning, and the longer the schools were closed, the worse the outcomes.

In a system increasingly dominated by older voters and short-term political optics, policy predictably shifts toward protecting current beneficiaries, even when long-term human capital is damaged.

In the years since, this trend has only served to intensify, with increasing priority placed on the old at the expense of the young. According to the OECD, “Most [social] spending goes to pensions and health.” Given aging populations and an aging voter base, this is not a surprise.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t help the elderly. But if we want civilization to continue, we cannot neglect the future.

Most individuals would agree with this sentiment: Although evidence is scant, when asked, many favor prioritizing the young. This is, however, not what is happening in real life.

Planting Trees

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.

This Greek proverb describes it well. Civilization is built on low time preference.

Capital accumulation and savings are necessary for investment. Only if a population’s time preference is low enough can there be sufficient savings for huge, long-term projects.

A hypothetical scenario illustrates this situation: You are a poor fisherman who catches fish by hand. If you eat your entire catch every day, you cannot advance. But if you sell part of your catch each day—even if it means a little extra hunger for a while—you can soon afford a fishing rod. With the rod, you can catch and sell more fish. Soon, you can afford a small fishing boat.

When you defer consumption to invest, it pays off in the long run.

To build a town, there must be enough people with this attitude. Tools, ports, infrastructure, machines, and universities all require sustained commitment that will only pay off later.

Real-World Evidence

Time preference is not a directly measurable number. As a result, it is difficult to gather data on this topic. We can, however, conduct surveys and test how answers correlate with real-world outcomes, such as savings rates or income. This is not a precise science, but we can use such surveys to infer overall patterns and tendencies.

At the national level, multiple studies find that time preference differs by country. Overall, time preference appears lower in the West than in much of the rest of the world. Accordingly, time preference correlates with per-capita income and indicators of development like productivity; the lower the time preference, the better the outcomes.

This pattern also shows up in how people treat nature. The environmental Kuznets curve describes a common trajectory: As countries transition from being very poor to poor, they pollute more. But as they transition from being poor to middle-income, they start taking better care of the environment. When people can afford to stop thinking about the next meal all the time, they begin caring for their surroundings.

Differences show up between and within countries. At the individual level, higher cognitive ability (measured by self-assessed math skills) correlates with lower time preference. Across age, time preference first decreases, then increases. The curve is hump-shaped, peaking in the mid-20s.

Taken together, these individual patterns make demographics hard to ignore when considering a society’s time horizon. Aging populations around the world are less and less interested in what the future will look like. They may proclaim support for “green” policies because of the future, but raising the retirement age goes a step too far.

We can see this playing out in France. Since July 2024, France has cycled through four prime ministers, held snap elections, and twice watched governments fall on parliamentary votes. The core problem is that some politicians have finally realized they need to reduce the deficit, but deficit reduction is politically and mathematically hard with a fractured parliament and a population unwilling to make sacrifices.

Pensions lie at the center of the conflict: Emmanuel Macron’s 2023 reform raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, triggering mass protests. Future attempts to tighten pension spending will likely have the same result: street protests and burning trash bins.

Tomorrow Is Real

Looking at civilizations from a time-preference perspective offers a useful way to think about the future. It highlights how we seem to be regressing and working to destroy the civilizational wealth our ancestors created.

If a culture is not capable of deferring gratification, if it does not prioritize the long run by investing in the young and accumulating capital, its future looks bleak. Goods become disposable; policies become present-focused.

Over time, the losses become structural. Human capital is easy to squander, harder to rebuild. The future cannot easily be bailed out once it has been neglected. For a civilization to endure, its people must act with tomorrow in mind.

As an individual, you can push back by leading with your example: Buy durable goods, build an emergency fund, plan for retirement, protect your health, learn a skill, and teach your children delayed gratification. Improving one’s immediate environment goes a long way. Start building what you may never live to see finished.