"...the disease of short-sightedness..."

     "But the motive of success is not enough.  It produces a short-sighted world which destroys the sources of its own prosperity. The cycles of trade depression which afflict the world warn us that business relations are infected through and through with the disease of short-sightedness.  The robber barons did not conduce to the prosperity of the Middle Ages, though some of them did die prosperously in their beds.  Their example is a warning to our civilization.  Also, we must not fall into the fallacy of thinking of the business world in abstraction from the rest of the community. The behavior of the community is largely dominated by the business mind.  A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their function.  Low thoughts mean low behavior, and after a brief orgy of exploitation, low behavior means a descending standard of life."
-Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas  (1933)