Governments should focus on solving the immediate problems of today rather than on trying to solve the anticipated problems of the future.

Governments should focus on solving the immediate problems of today rather than on trying to solve the anticipated problems of the future.

According to social contract theory, government originated from the rights yielded by people who contracted with each other to attain mutual benefits. Hence it is inherent nature of the government to tackle with various social problems for the common good. However there is no consensus on whether the government should focus more on pressing one or the predicted. Personally, I support that not only the urgently present matters calling for the interference from the public sector, some forecast problems, often temporally hidden, are the key point that government should concern more.

First of all, given the traits of social problems, many of them are developing and interweaving, thus it is unrealistic to merely focus on the problems just in front of us. For example, if a government, with strong pursuit of the economic scale, unrestrictedly attracts industries, even those severely polluting, the following consequence, near the future, will be another relative intractable problem left to be resolved, namely pollution governance. We can see from this situation that in reality, a social problem is not absolutely insular and static, which demands our government to adopt policies from a developmental and forecasting aspect. It can be imagined that without the anterior consideration on the future trouble, some problems cannot be thoroughly ironed out, thus further increasing the costs and the difficulties to manage. Therefore, in order to prevent the emerging problems from diffusing and exacerbating, it is wiser, reasonable as well, for government to put more emphasis on the preventions of anticipated problems.

Admittedly, some doubts are cast down to the possibility and the accuracy of predicting the future problems. These people argued that the forecast problems are so untenable that it isn’t worthy to put much attention to those matter, and that may mislead policy making. However, we should consider the unprecedented development of public policy analysis, not only in the organization, but also the technology. First, specialization and the calling of scientific decision making, more and more professional public policy experts and think tanks have come into being and exerted their significance in recognizing, preventing and resolving society problems. Besides, cloud computing and big data afford the government more tools of public policy analysis, whose reliability is highly warranted as well. With implementing those high-tech to prediction of social problems and crisis, some governments set up the system of public sentiment forewarning, to scientifically forecast the problems.

In summary, I strongly suggest that government should cast more concerns on the anticipated problems, not only for the necessity given the duty of government, and the society as well, but also for the feasibility achieved by technology implementing.