Shifting Baselines Syndrome: How Generational Amnesia Hides the State of Things
Every assumption about futures contains baseline expectations but often we fail to understand that, which clouds our true understanding of how things could and will be.
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Shifting baseline syndrome is the gradual redefinition of what counts as normal. Each generation takes the conditions it grew up with as the reference point, measures change against that, and passes a slightly degraded standard to the next. Long-run change becomes invisible, because the yardstick moves with it.
The classic illustration comes from fisheries. Populations in many waters are a fraction of what they were a century ago, and yet current catches look unremarkable to the people making them, because the comparison being drawn is with last season rather than with an unexploited sea.
Shifting baseline syndrome is the gradual redefinition of what counts as normal. Each generation takes the conditions it grew up with as the reference point, measures change against that, and passes a slightly degraded standard to the next. Long-run change becomes invisible, because the yardstick moves with it.
The classic illustration comes from fisheries. Populations in many waters are a fraction of what they were a century ago, and yet current catches look unremarkable to the people making them, because the comparison being drawn is with last season rather than with an unexploited sea.
Where the idea comes from
The concept appears in Ian McHarg's 1969 book Design With Nature, which contrasts the modern landscape with the one earlier people lived on. The name arrived later: fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined "shifting baseline syndrome" in a 1995 paper on anecdote and fisheries assessment, describing how each generation of scientists took the stock levels at the start of their own careers as the benchmark, so the decline never appeared in full.
The psychologist Peter Kahn at the University of Washington gave the intergenerational half of the problem its own name, environmental generational amnesia: the observation that people calibrate what counts as a healthy environment against the one they encountered as children, whatever state it was already in.
Two mechanisms, working together. Within a lifetime, we stop noticing slow change. Across lifetimes, the reset happens completely, because there is no memory left to contradict it.
The syndrome is not only ecological
The pattern travels well beyond fisheries and forests.
Technology and convenience. Few people will now wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to load. Thirty years ago, connecting to the web at all was the event, and the wait was part of it. The device most people carry outperforms the computers that flew Apollo 11, gives instant access to a large share of recorded knowledge, and takes better photographs than most dedicated cameras from a decade ago. It is a remarkable object, and it is invisible, because the baseline moved to meet it.
Working hours. In the UK, the average full-time week fell from 46 hours in 1946 to 40 by 1979. From 1980 the trend faltered, and by 2016 it had fallen only a further 2.5 hours, to 37.5. The New Economics Foundation calculated that had the post-war rate of decline continued, the UK would have been on course for a 30-hour week by 2040. It attributes the stall to labour market deregulation, weaker collective bargaining and slower earnings growth rather than to any limit on what was possible.
The second example is the more instructive one, because it shows the syndrome working on an improvement rather than a loss. The forty-hour week now reads as a natural resting point rather than as a trend that stopped. Nobody experiences the missing hours, because a baseline that never moved leaves no trace to notice.
The complication: we also romanticise the past
Alongside the amnesia runs its apparent opposite. People tend to remember past periods more favourably than they experienced them at the time, an effect named rosy retrospection by Mitchell, Thompson, Peterson and Cronk in a 1997 study.
These two pull in different directions, and both distort. Shifting baselines make us understate how much has changed. Rosy retrospection makes us overstate how good the earlier state was. A person can hold both at once: unable to see the decline in a specific measurable condition, while convinced in general terms that things used to be better. Which is roughly the texture of most conversations about the good old days.
For anyone working on the future, the practical consequence is that memory of the recent past is unreliable in two directions at the same time, and neither error corrects the other.
A worked case: the reset after Covid
The pandemic looked, at the time, like the kind of shock that resets baselines permanently. A great deal of the discussion in 2020 and 2021 concerned the new normal and how deliberately it could be shaped.
Six years on, the more interesting outcome is how much of the baseline snapped back rather than moved. Suspended behaviours returned. Offices refilled, if unevenly. The reference point for what is normal did shift, but mostly to early 2020 rather than forward to something new.
This is worth understanding as a pattern rather than as a disappointment. A large disruption opens what policy scholars call a window, a period in which alternatives that were previously unrealistic become available. Windows close. When they do, the return to the prior state is often experienced as an achievement in itself, which makes the prior state harder to question afterwards than it was before the shock.
The lesson for foresight work is that shocks are unreliable engines of change. They create the opening. Whether anything moves through it is a separate matter, and it depends on whether someone had an alternative prepared.
Why this is a foresight problem
Every projection has a baseline, whether or not anybody has stated it. Business as usual, the continuation case, the do-nothing scenario: each one encodes a picture of the present that came from somewhere. In practice it usually came from the working memory of the people in the room, which means it is anchored to whenever their careers began.
That produces three recurring failures. Continuation scenarios describe a stable present that was never stable. Change that has already happened gets treated as the fixed backdrop rather than as evidence of a trajectory. And improvements are undercounted, which removes the case that deliberate change is possible without anyone arguing against it.
Five practices that hold the baseline still
Date the baseline out loud. At the start of a strategy or scanning session, write down the year that "normal" refers to. It is usually close to the year the most senior person present started their career. Naming it takes a minute and changes the conversation.
Look back as far as you intend to look forward. A fifteen-year forward horizon deserves a fifteen-year backward pass first. Working through what has already changed in that period is the cheapest available corrective, and it also calibrates the group on how much change a decade and a half can actually contain.
Prefer long series to recollection. Where a data series exists, use it rather than asking the room what has changed. Records resist baseline drift and memory does not. Where no series exists, archives, photographs and old planning documents do similar work.
Split the room by tenure. Put the same question to the newest and the longest-serving people separately. Their baselines are decades apart, and the gap between the two answers is a direct measurement of how far the reference point has travelled.
Count the gains as well as the losses. Shifting baselines hide progress as effectively as decline, and a picture of the future that contains only deterioration stops being usable. People who believe nothing has ever improved have little reason to think anything can.
The point
The syndrome is not a failure of attention. It is what perception does with slow change, and no amount of concern about it makes it go away. What can be done is procedural: state the baseline, extend the historical view to match the forward one, and use records where memory would otherwise fill in.
Because then again, how can you expect to make the world a better place for current and future generations if you are unaware of the change around you?
Originally published on Medium in 2023 and revised in September 2026.
Sources
"Design with Nature" Ian L. McHarg, John Wiley & Sons Inc. (1969)
"Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries" Daniel Pauly, Trends in Ecology & Evolution (1995)
"Fast-forward — Comparing a 1980s Supercomputer to the Modern Smartphone" Adobe Acrobat Team, Adobe Blog (2022) Link
"Average Weekly Hours Fell Faster Between 1946 and 1979 Than Post-1980" New Economics Foundation (2019) Link
"The Role of Rosy Retrospection in the Presentation of Personal Histories" Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1957) Link
Frequently asked questions
What is shifting baseline syndrome? The gradual redefinition of what counts as normal, in which each generation adopts the conditions it encountered as its reference point. Long-term change becomes difficult to perceive because the standard of comparison moves along with the conditions being measured.
Who coined the term? Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, in a 1995 paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The underlying concept appears earlier, in Ian McHarg's Design With Nature (1969).
What is the difference between shifting baseline syndrome and generational amnesia? Generational amnesia is the intergenerational half of the same problem: the reset that happens when nobody left has direct experience of the earlier state. The psychologist Peter Kahn uses the term environmental generational amnesia for the ecological version. Shifting baseline syndrome covers both the within-lifetime drift and the between-generation reset.
How does shifting baseline syndrome affect strategy and forecasting? It corrupts the starting point. Continuation and business-as-usual scenarios rest on a description of the present that typically comes from the working memory of the people building them, which anchors it to the beginning of their careers rather than to any dated evidence.
Is shifting baseline syndrome the same as rosy retrospection? No, and they pull in opposite directions. Rosy retrospection is the tendency to recall past periods more favourably than they were experienced. Shifting baselines cause change to be understated; rosy retrospection causes the earlier state to be overstated. Both can operate in the same person at the same time.
How do you counter it? Procedurally rather than through awareness alone: state and date the baseline explicitly, extend the historical review to match the forward horizon, use long data series instead of recollection, compare answers across tenure within the group, and track improvements alongside deterioration.
