【Flyer杀G】小组-7.12 Issue56, by Sean

柏拉图的世界UID: 2581296

TOPIC: ISSUE56 - "Governments should focus more on solving the immediate problems of today rather than trying to solve the anticipated problems of the future."
WORDS: 124
TIME: 00:19:25
DATE: 2010/7/13 23:35:40

When handling enormous problems emerging in our society, governments have to take the comparative scarcity of viable funds, labors and materials into account. Thus, it comes to be a critical issue whether more focuses should fall on the immediate problems or the anticipated problems of the future. The emphasis should stand on the ground of discriminating the characteristics of problems. As our society is growing even more complex, problems coupling with such a progress turn out to be pretty various. It is prerequisite to perform deliberate inspection as well as reasonable inference to reveal features of these problems, on which our decisions to distribute efforts rest on.

Abrupt and severe crises like earthquake, volcanic eruption or pestilence, which would cause mass death, must be addressed without any delay. It is about fundamental morals, and it would incur escalated turbulence as well as casualties if no effective actions are taken. However, not all immediate problems should firstly without any distinction. For instance, during the global financial crisis since 2007, financial grids failed, factories shut down and business collapse. So many aspects of society intensively called for coverage and remedy at the same time, but the US government devoted funds and efforts into financial systems in the first place. To do this is because that the complex society is just similar to human body, in which the financial systems play the role as vascular structures supplying other parts nutrients, namely funds. Only when liquidity is secured can other components of modern society gains sufficient financial support and then recover.


Besides that, many anticipated problems should attract enough attention and preparation from governments, which relates to the government’s intensive regulation compared with instantaneous economic behavior. In the society with mature market economy, people seek for their individual profits and thus prosper the society as whole, with higher efficiency and throughput. Yet individuals often fail to potential threats, and they would probably be averse to invest efforts to handle these might-be problems in advance. It is the responsibility for governments. For instance, there won’t be pestilence everyday in a particular territory, but public sanitation should always stand at service. Once SARS or swine influenza bursts out, incapable health treatment would lead to overspreading death.

However, when deciding whether government should at once set out to some critical anticipated problems, cost ought to be estimated. To handle some anticipated problems may exhaust to much societal resources regarding contemporary development, and thus make governments out at elbows when addressing other emergent issues. Casting a look back at former SU, who employ most national force on anticipated star war proposed by US, have finally fallen largely due to excessively deficiency supply of light industry.
In addition, some immediate problems and anticipated problems are intrinsically contradicting, while both are significant for the society as a whole. Facing to such dilemma, governments are supposed to keep balance with extraordinary care. Inequity of wealth is considered to be a long-term problem many nations have been fighting with, while how to thrive social production is a short-term question to well cover. On one hand, if the absolute equity is compulsory executed by governments, many people might lose motivation, since no matter how hard they work, they can only share the same amount of wealth with others. It retards the economic growth with no doubt, and decrease average income of the society. On the other hand, if competition in which winners take more the losers is over-advocated, gap between the wealthy and poor will get enlarged. It incur collision, hatred, turbulence as well as violation, and finally compromise the economy.

In sum, it is over-simplified to decide whether focus on some issues regarding whether they are immediate or anticipated for future. To well distribute confined social resources, governments should take into account the urgency, significance as well as cost that might be called for. They also have to balance some mutually interacting problems.