> Our economy promotes short-term gains and not long-term initiatives; I blame over 30 years of artificially-low interest rates for this.

Don't low interest rates promote long-term thinking, perhaps to an absurd degree (e.g. the "it's okay that we hemorrhage money price dumping for 10 years as long as we develop a monopoly" playbook)? Bigger interest rate = bigger discount for present value of a future reward.