Incentives > Intentions

I’ve been thinking a lot about why governments so often feel misaligned with what people actually need.

The easy popular answer is: lack of skill, greed and thirst for power.

But I don’t think it’s just incompetence or bad intentions.

I think it’s incentives.

In most democracies, leaders get a short window in power.

Often 4 or 5 years. That’s not much time.

And getting elected is expensive, in money, in favors, in political debt.

So once someone gets in, the pressure is immediate: show results fast, keep the machine running, secure the next term, and don’t lose control of the narrative.

Long-term projects don’t fit naturally into that system.

Anything that takes 10, 20, 30 years to really pay off is hard to sell, hard to defend, and easy for the next administration to claim credit for or quietly abandon.

That’s why policy can feel contradictory.

You’ll hear “sustainable tourism”, “conservation”, “green growth”.

Sometimes those initiatives are real.

But at the same time you’ll see large-scale land conversion, forests being opened up for plantations, mining permits, oil and gas, and all the things that create quick economic activity.

Because those are measurable within one term.

Jobs.
Taxes.
GDP.
Headlines.

Everybody can point at a number and say “we delivered”.

And to be fair, it’s not like humans can live with zero impact.

Almost everything we do affects nature.

Truly regenerative actions exist, but they’re limited and slow.

If you plant trees or restore an ecosystem, the real benefits take years, sometimes decades. If you extract, you can see the upside immediately.

The part that bothers me most is accountability.

Short-term success is rewarded instantly.

Long-term damage is delayed, spread out, and hard to trace back to one decision-maker.

By the time the consequences become obvious, the people who signed the papers are often gone, and the costs are carried by everyone else.

This is also why long-term planning can be easier in political systems where leadership stays in place longer (China, UAE, Singapore..)

When there’s stability at the top, governments can execute multi-decade strategies without constantly resetting priorities.

That doesn’t mean authoritarianism is morally superior. It just means the incentive structure is different.

The irony is that democracy was designed to limit power and prevent capture. But the same short election cycles that protect society can also make long-term thinking harder to sustain.

And it’s not only politicians.

Citizens get pulled into the same loop.

We live inside economies that reward consumption and speed.

People get trained into short-term thinking because it’s convenient and because the system depends on it.

More buying, more growth, more noise.

It becomes normal.

Who is actually incentivized to care about outcomes 10 generations from now?

I don’t have a perfect answer.

I just know that once you see the incentive structure clearly, a lot of government decisions stop being confusing.

They start looking predictable.

And if we want different outcomes, we’ll need to change what gets rewarded.