How to get low rates
The government manipulates interest rates all the time. In the US the Federal Reserve raises rates to head off inflation and then cuts them again to protect the financial system from the harm done by high rates.
Setting the rates too low produces inflation--and leaving the rates low after inflation has begun to rise makes savings grind to a stop. (If your money is worth less every day, why hold onto more than you need just to transact daily business?)
The only way to get lasting low rates is to have very low inflation. During periods when people had great confidence in their money, such as in England and the United States during the gold standard, people made just the sort of long-term decisions I'm talking about. Planting oak trees to be harvested after 400 years is an extreme (and probably apocryphal) example, but there were plenty of real-world examples of investments made and stewardship undertaken that only made economic sense if the discount rate were 2% or less.
A few years ago the inflation rate got down close to zero and the Fed panicked. They're much happier with an inflation rate that runs between 1% and 2%, because they worry that they don't have the tools to stop deflation once it starts. The problem with not driving inflation down to zero, though, is that long-term sustainable behaviour will never make sense when interest rates are high.
If you're going to get $100 after 50 years it doesn't make sense to invest even $9 today, if the discount rate is 5%. If the discount rate is 2% then you might invest $37, and if the discount rate is 1% then you might invest nearly $61.
To make sensible sustainable activity also make economic sense, you need to have very low interest rates. And the only way to get very low interest rates is to have very low inflation.
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