William Ascher's book is both directed and not directed toward the new breed of “randomistas” in the study of economic and political development. Randomistas are a growing group of academics and policymakers who value randomized research designs of development interventions (see, e.g., Martin Ravallion, “Should the Randomistas Rule?” Economists Voice [February 2009]: 105). The hard core among them believes that it is only through such elaborate measurement that can we reliably know anything about the consequences of policy intervention.

Ascher's work challenges this group in the sense that he provides a many-layered, interdisciplinary, and broad view of what he considers critical to successful development policy. As he has in the past, Ascher constructs his arguments from the bricks of his broad experience and the mortar of his deep knowledge of vast literatures. The result is big thinking, not the analysis of a single intervention that boasts tremendous internal validity but flags in attempts to generalize. This book also does not challenge randomistas, in the sense that I believe the author would be perfectly willing to accept such intensive techniques as one of many ways to move policy toward a farsightedness that he believes is generally absent.

Farsighted policy, Ascher argues, lies at the heart of development policy success. To “bring in the future,” he provides the strategies of promoting farsightedness and their intellectual foundations. The result is impressive. He succeeds in providing the reader with a great deal of fundamental thinking in multiple fields in order to sketch out dozens of avenues that policymakers may take in establishing successful interventions.

The book is structured around five parts. In the first, composed of three chapters, Ascher outlines the challenges of farsightedness, presents his analysis of the root causes of shortsightedness, and provides an overview of the solutions detailed later. He focuses on four causes: impatience, selfishness, the analytical limits of the parties involved in the policymaking, and vulnerability. Impatience can produce harmfully high discount rates, risk taking, procrastination, and substitution of easier goals for the ones that take more time (because short-term projects reward many of the parties involved). He then highlights seven “challenges” calling for farsightedness that he will return to throughout the book: family economic security, conservation and environmental protection, averting health and security risks, community self-help upgrading, promoting productivity, physical infrastructure, and charitable contributions.

In Chapter 3, Ascher seeks to make progress on overcoming the obstacles to farsighted policy. He believes that this can be achieved by examining topics such as the psychology of choice, attention, norms, identification, framing, and institutional structure. This chapter makes one of the more important contributions to the development literature by exploring the nonmaterial origins of individual choice. In doing so, the author integrates the work of scholars such as Herbert Simon, James Mazur, Jon Elster, George Lowenstein, Harold D. Lasswell, Douglass North, and Robert Axelrod in a way that is quite rare in the development literature. This exploration underscores his goal of examining the motivations for policy choice, rather than policy choices and their consequences (which is the subject of most of his previous work).

As Ascher moves to Part II, comprised of Chapters 4 through 7, he examines the world of rewards and risks and presents various ways to restructure them so that the problems inherent in his seven challenges can be overcome, or at least mitigated to some more acceptable level. He lists many strategies and provides examples of successful policy interventions. A reader is thankful that Ascher presents these solutions in table form (Table 4.1) because it is easy to get lost reading only the text. In addition to the tangible benefits and costs, he addresses how to “reschedule” social and psychological rewards (Chapter 5) and the realignment of performance evaluations (Chapter 6). I think the latter chapter misses the opportunity to address the concerns of the randomistas and the most recent thinking about evaluations and research design (see, e.g., Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer, “Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities,” Econometrica 72 [January 2004]: 159–217). In many cases, performance can be measured with robust research designs that allow strong inferences. Further, Ascher might have made the point that good evaluations require an intervention designed with explicit attention to later evaluations. He nudges at this and appropriately mentions the principal-agent problem, but there exists a growing body of work that moves beyond merely constructing better definitions.

In Chapter 7, Ascher discusses strategies that may provide policymakers' self-restraint. He offers many, and again the reader is aided by a table listing his ideas about these mechanisms. Here, he nicely employs theories that emerge from the new institutionalists, especially ways in which principals' hands can be tied for longer-term success. As before, the author pulls many of his ideas through the seven challenges offered at the very beginning of his study, using empirical examples for illustration.

In Part III, “Improving Analytical Frameworks,” Ascher moves back to one of his most important arguments, that individuals possess limited cognitive skills, certainly less than required by the expected utility models. He introduces “analytic exercises” that he believes can “induce consideration of future consequences” (p. 151), and applies them to the seven challenges. Part IV continues his concern about cognitive limitations by addressing how policy interventions for farsighted policies can be framed (with an excellent summary table on page 203), resurrecting Harold D. Lasswell's “triple appeal principle” (“The Triple-Appeal Principle: A Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Political and Social Science,” American Journal of Sociology 37 [January 1932]: 523–38) to help structure how farsighted policies can be communicated to citizens, and exploring the heuristics that lead to shortsighted policy and poor citizen reception.

Ascher summarizes much of the literature regarding the payoffs of institutional design in the last part of his book. There, he seeks to “empower and insulate the farsighted leader” (Chapter 13) and “structur[e] decision-making processes” so that farsighted policy is the outcome. Most of these solutions are to be found in the policy literature, and they remind the reader of such foundational works as those of Steven Haggard (Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in Newly Industrializing Countries 1990), Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz (“Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science 28 [February 1984]: 16–79), Matthew McCubbins, Roger Noll, and Barry Weingast (“Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 3 [1987]: 243–77), Terry Moe (“The Politics of Structural Choice: Toward a Theory of Public Bureaucracy” in Organizational Theory from Chester Bernard to the Present, ed. Oliver Williamson, 1984), and the rest of the new institutionalists of the 1980s and 1990s.

This is not a book for those who want more evidence about the efficacy of Ascher's prescriptions. This is a bit frustrating, since for every example he cites, one could easily provide dozens of counterexamples. More attention to the balance of views from empirical research would give the book greater persuasiveness. In a sense, I am criticizing the research design of the book (which is a book about research design, in that Ascher invites us to look at particular foundations of farsighted policy), for in places it reads like a list of what the author thinks needs to be addressed without placing his list in the context of others. This makes it appear that the book offers a discussion of dozens of independent variables without a clearer sense of why they are privileged over others—perhaps a wish list (with which I basically agree).

Without doubt, Bringing in the Future is one of the most sweeping and enjoyable studies to examine the fundamental problem of policymakers' shortsightedness. And, indeed, Ascher is the right person to make these general claims about the personal and structural impediments to the kind of farsighted policy that is so needed for both the simple and more intractable policy problems of today. He draws from his decades of experience as an academic, field researcher, and policy advisor. The book provides a sufficient number of examples needed to understand his conceptual approach, and it cites an enormous range of literature that allows all students of policymaking to pursue more deeply the ideas he develops.