Jean Luo

It really just started out as a journey to learn and to...

begin to put the pieces together.

My general concern is, as a society, we are not spending any time talking about our long-term success.

In fact, if you look at all of the ways that our government makes decisions, almost all of them are inherently short-term.

If you look at, for example, the budget that Congress approves, our budget window is a 10-year budget window.

What's really interesting about that is that any meaningful long-term investment, and the most obvious one is investments in young people, look negative in 10 years.

If you make an investment today in healthcare for young people, preschool for young people, food for young people, putting a roof over young people's head if they don't have one,

over 30 years, the returns on those investments are so profitable.

I mean, there's no more profitable investment really that our government could make than in young people.

But when you look at those same investments over a 10-year time horizon, they look terrible.

They look super negative.

You're spending all this money to educate young people or to feed them or to provide them health care, and you're not yet seeing it show up in earnings later on.

And so we're just constantly making these terrible decisions where we're

you know, distributing a huge amount of money to older folks in America, which is not necessarily the wrong thing to do.

The problem is that we're just not distributing a lot of resources to young people.

And that means as a result that we're just shortchanging our future every single day.

And so to me, what I what really drew me to this was the realization that, like, I'm just not hearing leaders talk about the next 100 years, what we need to do differently to set America up for success over a longer time horizon.

And unfortunately, the government is best positioned to invest long term.

Right.

That's what's so surprising and frustrating about the whole thing.