A country that has stopped thinking

A rather apposite subheading appeared in the above-titled article in Saturday's Herald:

"Prosperity has brought us ... a lack of vision and an absence of courage"

This is a pithy illustration of the difficulty this country - this world - has in coming to grips with long-term issues. You'd think prosperity would afford us the breathing space to tackle the harder - and more pressing - problems of the future. But it's the reverse: we use our vote to entrench short-termism.

With wealth and prosperity, we find it paradoxically difficult to invest in our future. We are persuaded to subvert all other values to monetary ones... in the aggregate, this is what has happened in the last few elections.