Well, if sustainability is the overarching value, then we must note that it is for the future generations which means the bulk of stakeholders have not been born yet, and so it is not possible to consult like seven generations down the line – the humanity of the future – of what to do today. Our “good enough” proxy is to be a “good enough” ancestor. “Good enough” ancestor, to me, means not foreclosing possibilities of future generations. It is not a bad ancestor that destroys the Earth – then, of course there is no future generations – but it is not a perfect ancestor that designs or over-designs everything so that the next generation has no room to innovate either. So, basically it is the idea of co-creative design with the hope that our next generation will enjoy even more freedom – free from scarcity, free from fear, free from the nation-to-nation conflicts, and so on – compared to our generation, and therefore our decisions, while making the current generation prosper of course – that is human nature – should always be weighed against the interest of the possibility of creation of future human generations. So, I think for most people, the longer horizon actually makes it easier to agree on “good enough” consensus.If you think only about the next quarter, the business interests of course will conflict with the environmental interests, but if you think 30 years or 50 years down the line, interestingly most business interests will align with the environmental interests because if the environment gets destroyed in 20 years’ time, there is no business to speak of, so the longer term or the longer horizon that a governance system can prompt its constituents and stakeholders to think, then the more successful we will be to get “good enough” consensus on values, as well as being “good enough” ancestors. So, I think the government’s goal, far from being a monopoly on setting the facilitation of those public infrastructures in which people act with a longer horizon and more pro-socially, should be a collaborative design with anyone in the social or economic sectors striving toward the same pro-social public infrastructures in which the people will naturally communicate toward such longer termism.It is a very simple idea, but I spent quite some time to get into the details because the language we use is overly-abstract for this, so I needed to kind of chart a precise design.

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