3 ms·

What's scarier - disastrous long-term consequences, or long-term success over other strategies?

• Mirioron 8y ago
  Disastrous long-term consequences are scarier as long as they have some short term benefits. At least with long-term success you have something positive at the end. Humans, particularly politicians and young people, tend to have a high time preference. That is, they put more emphasis on the here and now over future deferred rewards and consequences. This means that if a strategy has good short term rewards, then people will often ignore the long-term effects. Even if you can show that the long-term effects are negative, they are likely to ignore it. Eg moving towards socialism. We have plenty of evidenced from past attempts that socialism is likely not going to work, but people still like advocating for such policies, because they have a positive impact in the short term.