Decisions about saving money, for instance, are heavily distorted by impatience, which helps explain why so many struggle in retirement. Pigou’s perspective suggests that saving might be easier if we could somehow imagine the future more vividly, a hypothesis supported by the work of the U.C.L.A. economist Hal Hershfield. As Venkataraman describes his experiments, he showed subjects in one group of volunteers photographs of themselves that had been digitally altered to simulate their appearance in old age, but no such photographs to a second group. When he then gave all his subjects some money they could either spend or save, members of the first group saved significantly more.

Another strategy focuses on boosting the payoffs of future-oriented choices. Here Venkataraman describes a trade-off between farming practices with high current yields and those that better protect land’s long-term fertility. Midwest grain farmers, for example, typically plow their fields each spring to plant annual grain crops rather than perennial varieties, which have lower yields but deeper roots that limit erosion. Attempting to encourage a more future-oriented approach, a Kansas scientist, Wes Jackson, has spent decades developing perennials whose current yields come closer to those of annuals. To date, Venkataraman writes, his strains have won only niche adoptions, but his research continues.

One hurdle is that although many farmers own their land and would thus benefit directly from preventing erosion, the behavior of other farmers can make perennial adoption prohibitively costly. Land prices are determined disproportionately by earnings from high-yielding annuals, Venkataraman explains, which makes it harder for perennial adopters to carry their mortgages.

This problem arises in extreme form in the fishing industry. Venkataraman is on firm footing when she writes, “What makes sense in the short run because it is rewarded by the marketplace, like fishing all the red snapper out of the ocean, is not what’s good for the long run, because it destroys the fishery forever.”

Note, however, that overfishing has little to do with shortsightedness. Even if almost everyone had perfect foresight and self-discipline, those who restricted their current catch would be rewarded only by seeing the fish they’d left behind harvested instead by others. Problems that have this structure, known as “tragedies of the commons,” are solved by punishing those who violate collectively imposed quotas, not by appeals to show greater respect for the future.