Remember the Gerber Baby

We are dangerously short-sighted. Here is one way to correct that.

Think for a moment about 1928.

Babe Ruth and the Yankees. Prohibition, speakeasies, Al Capone. It’s been a year since Charles Lindbergh flew a plane solo across the Atlantic Ocean and became one of the most famous people in the world. Radio and jazz were the hot new things. The Charleston craze had passed its peak. A young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong is on his way up.

In 1928, Herbert Hoover is elected President of the United States. Winston Churchill is finishing a disastrous run as Chancellor of the Exchequer and his career will soon go into a tailspin.

In 1928, Adolf Hitler has been released from prison after a failed coup d’état and is a marginal political figure in Weimar Germany, where the economy is thriving and the republic finally seems to be on solid footing.

Nineteen twenty-eight was a very long time ago. At least from a conventional perspective.

But consider another fact about 1928: That year, the Gerber baby food company held a contest and selected what became the original “Gerber baby.”

Last Friday, Gerber announced that Ann Turner Cook had died at the age of 95. Cook was the model that artist Dorothy Hope Smith used to draw the sketch that became the Gerber baby.

In the usual way we think of time, 1928 was a very long time ago, but we can also think of 1928 as a single human lifetime ago. Which isn’t long at all.

Lifespan is the most fundamental fact of human existence and yet thinking of time in terms of lifespans is rare. I find that bewildering. If we want to understand people and make decisions that contribute to human flourishing, it seems almost self-evident that lifespan should be the basic unit for measuring time in human affairs — the equivalent of the yard or the metre in measuring distance. (Sorry, my American friends, the whole rest of the world spells it “metre.”)

So let’s do that. One metre = 1 m, so one lifetime = 1 lt.

You may object that, unlike the metre, the lt changes as human life expectancy changes. But that, I would suggest, is a feature, not a bug. Unlike the metre, the lt isn’t an arbitrary unit. It measures something deeply meaningful to people. If human life expectancy were to shoot up to, say, 200 years, how we think about time should adjust accordingly. If it doubled to 400 years, our thinking should change again.

To see this unmistakably, use the most extreme example: Imagine that after being born, humans grew to maturity in three hours, and died, on average within 24 hours. What would we consider a “short term” timespan in our lives? Five minutes, maybe. Twenty minutes, tops. What would “long term” be? Possibly two or three hours. In any event, the scale would be so radically different as to be inconceivable to slow, ancient tortoises like us, with our decades of life.

It should be obvious — but isn’t — that the timescales we use matter enormously.

They are how we frame reality. They determine where we direct our attention. And how we make decisions: It is routine to draw information from the past to make a decision in the present which we hope will have the intended effect in the future. But only the present is a fixed point in this process. “The past” could be five hours ago. Or five years, five centuries, five millennia, or more. Similarly, the future could be anything from tomorrow morning to the five billion years from now when the sun will implode.

The timescales we use change everything.

If we see 1928 as ancient history — back there with Napoleon, the fall of Rome, and the building of the pyramids — the past we use as our source of information for decision-making is likely to be very shallow. So the information we use in our decisions will be shallow, too. The same goes for the future: It’s a safe bet that anyone who thinks 1928 is an ancient history that tells us little about the present also thinks 2100 is the sci-fi future that can be safely ignored.

This is the “temporal myopia” I’ve mentioned previously, and will write more about later. Think of the famously near-sighted Mr. Magoo peering into the past and future. How far does he see? Not far. Mr. Magoo is also famously lucky, so his myopia leads to hilarity, not disaster. For those who are not so fortunate, temporal myopia is a lot more dangerous.

If I may be permitted to quote myself providing an illustration:

Rapidly rising housing prices in the United States played a critical role in the financial crisis of 2008 but in the years prior to the bubble bursting few observers thought anything was amiss. It’s normal for housing prices to rise rapidly, they said. Just look at the past. And they were right. Prices had been rising rapidly for many years, which made rising prices look pretty normal — to the many Mr. Magoos. But economist (and future Nobel laureate) Robert Shiller thought the data were far too shallow — too myopic — so he dug into archives and assembled a data set on housing prices that extended all the way back to the 19th century. It showed rapid rises were anything but normal. Shiller sounded the alarm but he was mostly dismissed. Until the crash.

Thinking in terms of a single human lifetime as the basic unit of measuring time in human affairs helps correct temporal myopia.

So how much time should count as one lt today? That’s debatable.

Here is a chart of life expectancies at birth since the 16th century.

These numbers mask a great deal of variation, notably by gender (women live longer) and income. It’s also a mistake to use averages for this purpose because what we want to get at is how long a person can reasonably expect to live. That’s longer than the most probable date of expiry: I was born in 1968 in Canada, so I started with a life expectancy of 72 years, but this really cool life expectancy calculator tells me I now have a 44 per cent chance of living to 90 and a 16 percent chance of living until 95.

Sixteen percent is substantial. It’s a little more than one in six. One in six is the probability of losing a round of Russian roulette. If I played Russian roulette, I’d take that probability seriously. So I think I should take the probability of living to 95 seriously, too. This is why actuaries today commonly recommend that people plan retirement savings on that basis.

Thus when we think about a single human lifetime — one lt — 95 is a reasonable number to use today.

Plus, that’s how long Ann Turner Cook lived, so it’s easy to remember: Think of the Gerber baby.

If the lt is our base unit for measuring time in human affairs and the equivalent of the metre, we can sub-divide it to produce centi-lifetimes (clt) and milli-lifetimes (mlt).

One lt = 34,675 days (or 95 years)

One clt = 346.75 days

One mlt = 34.675 days

I like these terms because we intuitively get that if the metre is the basic unit, the centimetre is small and the millimetre is tiny. Same for the lifetime, centilifetime, and millilifetime. And that’s helpful. Because the centilifetime is almost one year, and the millilifetime is more than one month — timespans that we often treat as being substantial or even large. But relative to one human lifetime, they are, respectively, small and tiny. That’s good perspective. It changes what we see and think about.

To see that, try imagining that you are hopelessly selfish. Your only concern is you.

What should your temporal horizons be? What timespan should concern you and occupy your thoughts?

One lt, obviously. Because your life is all you care about.

One lt is 95 years at birth. If you’re now 40, you have a little more than half a century of selfish concern left. That takes you to 2077.

Now consider what the average person actually spends time thinking about and planning for. Is it measured in decades? How much time does the average person spend thinking about the world after 2050, what conditions are necessary for you to live the life you want, and what you can do to ensure those conditions? For the vast majority of people, those are rhetorical questions: We spend precisely zero hours giving any of this serious consideration.

Of course we all spend enormous amounts of time thinking about the future — one psychologist calls our species Homo prospectus — but that time is overwhelmingly dominated by the extreme short term. I don’t mean centilifetimes and millilifetimes. I mean minutes, hours, and days. Occasionally, we may make a plan months in advance or have a vague intention to do something next year. And thanks to an insistent financial planner, we may have some of those charts that show our retirement savings will run out long before we expire, and that makes us nervous, so we say we will get serious and fix that some day. (Soon. Eventually.) But relative to one human lifetime, almost all of our prospection is about as far-sighted as Mr. Magoo’s vision.

The same probably goes for the workplace, incidentally. The prospection of private businesses maxes out a quarter or two into the future, with only an occasional “long-term strategy” exercise — usually something glib and soon forgotten — looking ahead a few years. Government thinking tends to be capped by election cycles of four years or less, but in practice far more cognitive bandwidth is budget-to-budget or project-to-project. And countless people, executives and plebs alike, in the private sector and public, spend most of their time stamping out grassfires — meaning they think hour to hour, and day to day, and almost never think about anything but surviving the week.

Notice I have yet to mention anything about the past. As I noted, decisions in the present for the benefit of the future must draw on information from the past. How far back should we look for that information? Let’s arbitrarily say we should look as far back as we look ahead. There’s a stronger case to suggest it should be much longer than that, but let’s keep this undemanding.

The 55 years between now and 2077 would take us back to 1967. And the total range of time over which your thoughts should roam would be from 1967 to 2077. That’s a 110-year span.

Now picture a heat-map of that time span. There’s one fuzzy red dot for every serious thought, say, a month into the future, or five years into the past. Time periods in the future or the past that someone spends a great deal of time thinking about would be cherry red. Times that never seriously occupy the mind are cold blue. What would that heat map look like across 110 years? We all know the answer. A tiny region clustered around the present would be blazing red, dropping off rapidly and leaving most of the time span as cold as space.

And this, remember, that timespan if what an unusually selfish person should think about.

Let’s dial back that selfishness just a little and introduce a child who is now ten. This selfish parents care about the child, if not the rest of humanity. What should this person’s range of concern be now?

Given the child’s life expectancy, tack on another 85 years. That takes it into the next century — to 2107, to be precise. And back to 1937. For a total timespan of 170 years.

Add a grandchild this selfish person cares about and the range of concern should extend to 2137. And back to 1907. A timespan of 230 years.

That’s quite a chunk of time this person’s thoughts should be seriously roaming. And remember, this is still an unusually selfish person — who only cares about immediate family. Most people aren’t so selfish. They also care about their extended families, communities, faiths, kinship groups, or nations. They want these collectives to live on and on and prosper. So they should be thinking about the even more distant future, and looking further into the past to inform that thinking.

(Note that these numbers are unrealistically conservative. I assumed that each generation had only one child and the parents were aged 30 at that child’s birth. Age of parents at first birth is higher than that in many places and rising steadily. If that number continues rising, and if fertility rates stay higher than one — and they’d better or our species will vanish — the time ranges would be considerably longer.)

If it sounds crazy to suggest’s people’s thoughts should roam over centuries, consider that some wise people would argue that my thinking is far too short-sighted.

In The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand argued that if we see human civilization as a strange new creation that we are in the midst of — easy to do from biological, geological, or astronomical perspectives — then it is “the long now.” Brand created The Long Now Foundation to encourage people to think on much vaster timescales. Among its project is a 10,000 year clock designed to keep time without human intervention.

Next to Brand’s vision, thinking seriously about 200 or 300 year timespans is child’s play.

But we don’t do even that child’s play. Or anything even close to that.

Now, you might reasonably object that we don’t look ahead decades and centuries because it’s impossible to know much about the world decades and centuries ahead. So forecasting and planning — which is what we usually do when we think about the future — are impossible.

In fact, forecasting is impossible across timespans like that. We shouldn’t waste our time trying. Or waste our time listening to those who claim they can. (I know a good book about just that.)

But it is possible to think about possible futures, ranging from nightmares to what we passionately want for our children and grandchildren. We can do that with sufficient concreteness and detail to make this much more than an exercise in daydreaming. And we explore what must happen between then and now for those futures to come to pass. And what we can do now to nudge the flow of time this way or that. I’ll write lots more about this in future.

But for now, let’s keep the point simple: Given our longevity, there’s a huge mismatch between the timespans we should be thinking seriously about and those we do think about. Ninety-five years in the past isn’t long ago, in a fundamental sense. Ninety-five years in the future should very much be our concern, right here, right now.

Remember the Gerber baby.

Before I go, I have to include this completely useless aside:

The reference above to a species that lives 24 hours reminded me of a species that actually does live 24 hours. On average. Sort of. (Google it.) It is the mayfly (aka shadfly), an insect that hatches in immense numbers on large water bodies in the Great Lakes region, flies about in swarms, then dies, littering the landscape with mayfly corpses like an insect rapture.

In the Great Lakes regions of the United States, the mayfly is also known as the “Canadian soldier.” I recall my dad, a biologist, telling me this was a derisive name — they die in a day, see? — probably dating from the First or Second World Wars.

So I took a spin through the newspaper archives. There are many instances of mayflies being called “Canadian soldiers” in the US, but these were never explained in the articles. Nor was there any apparent negative connotation attached to the term. Most tellingly, the earliest use I found was in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat of 1892. Given that in 1892 Americans and Canadians hadn’t fought alongside or against each other since the War of 1812, that suggests a somewhat more neighbourly origin for the name: In most of the American regions where the nickname is common, mayflies appear in huge swarms, like an invading army, and they come from the Great Lakes, which are to the north. Hence, “Canadian soldiers.”

I also discovered several references to Canadians calling mayflies “Yankee soldiers.” The earliest such reference was 1936. That suggests Canadians applied the same thought process in reverse, or they took the American nickname as an insult and returned the compliment. However, these references were all in American newspapers. I couldn’t find any mention of the “Yankee soldiers” nickname in a Canadian newspaper. That raises a third possibility: Some American journalist just made up that colourful little tidbit.

If you are a Canuck reader and you have heard Canadians refer to mayflies as “Yankee soldiers,” please let me know. I am running dangerously low on stocks of useless information.