Short-Termism Quotes

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.

I sometimes wonder how some people can live with themselves in some of the big companies today. So many far-reaching decisions are based on how they will affect the next shareholders' meeting.

The dominance of short-term perspectives has led to routine decisions in the markets that sacrifice the long-term buildup of genuine value in pursuit of artificial, short-term gains.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

What Republicans have to get away from is just worrying about the next election and start thinking about what is good for the country down the road.

The American political system has become so short term oriented.

Politics means facing up to hard choices and facing down prejudice, short-termism, the easy, tempting court of knee-jerk public reaction.

Whilst large organisations need foresight, they are also notorious in their bias for short term thinking, sometimes rejecting or even suppressing foresight.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity.

Short-termism is no good: plans must be carried through to the end.

Capitalism is a wonderful economic engine, but it assigns little value to long-term projects or societal problems.

In the long term everyone traffics in foregone conclusions, and in the short term they just get drunk. This is the way it has always been. Some half-assed ambiguity masquerading as mystery is all anybody's really looking for.

I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.

Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic.

Capitalism is the best way of organizing economic activity for a lot of reasons. It unlocks a higher fraction of human potential, it balances supply and demand, it's more consistent with higher levels of freedom. But the way we're pursuing it now, focuses on such short-term horizons, that a lot of businesses and investors are tempted to look at investments in terms of what's gonna happen in the next 90 days, what's gonna happen in one year. But the old phrase, "Good things take time," is true of successful businesses as well.

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

America would be a better place if leaders would do more long-term thinking.

There is still too much pressure on short-termism in terms of the drivers of success.

Even though we live in a fast-changing world with short term-ism all around, it requires years of determination to transform a company and structurally reap the rewards. Innovation companies need to set their sights on solving unmet needs - but this approach requires focus and long-term tenacity.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

The constant drive for campaign dollars has distorted decision-making in Washington, DC, to the point where our systems can no longer effectively address complex, long-term problems like the climate crisis. Which brings me to my other major concern - the short-term focus of capitalism. It distorts the allocation of resources and the decision-making processes of companies.

The [political] system is too responsive now. It responds to every short term whim without regard to the long term.