In my previous post, I discussed a major challenge democracy faces (check it out). Another flaw democracy faces is in democracy’s structural bias toward the short term, its tendency to mortgage the future for present-day popularity.
This bias is baked into the nature of electoral politics. A politician's re-election depends on their popularity over the next two, four, or six years, not on whether their policies create a better world decades from now. The incentives are misaligned: what matters most long-term often matters least at the ballot box.
A surreal example comes from Chicago. In 2008, the city sold the rights to its parking meters to a consortium of foreign investors, including a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, for $1.16 billion. That is, when you pay parking fees in Chicago your money is going to Riyadh, not Chicago. These meters now generate around $230 million in annual revenue, meaning Chicago would have made more than the sale price in just five years. Recent estimates suggest the investors have already earned over $2.1 billion from the deal, and the contract lasts until 2083. The city also sold its Skyway toll road to a Canadian pension fund and various parking garages to private interests. If Chicago had retained these assets, it’s estimated the city would be $3 to $4 billion better off.
And yet, at the time, this plan was fairly popular amongst Chicagoans because it aligned with the Mayor’s plan of balancing the budget without raising property taxes, and people really did not want to pay property taxes.
This story underscores a central truth: people in the future don’t vote. So when policymakers make decisions that provide short-term relief at the cost of long-term stability, the most affected individuals—future residents, taxpayers, and citizens—have no say. And present-day voters often aren’t made fully aware of the long-term costs of keeping taxes low or pushing off difficult reforms.
Once you start noticing this dynamic, it’s hard to unsee. Take the upcoming New York City mayoral election. One of the leading candidates, Zohran Mamdani, has proposed sweeping rent control policies. Rent control is great for the small amount of people in the short term who get capped rent, but makes new construction untenable, leaves buildings abandoned because the buildings owners can no longer cover basic maintenance, misallocates housing, and shrinks housing supply (if you don’t believe me look at the repeated examples, for one Poland). All this serves to shift costs onto future New York renters. This kind of policy appeals to current voters—people who already live in the city and vote—not to future residents or the next generation of renters. And yet it’s those very people who will suffer the consequences.
This leads into the most popularized example of this, the United States national debt, which at this point is about 37 trillion dollars, more than 122.89% of the GDP, and over $100,000 per person. Now, not all debt is bad, any successful company will show you this. Sometimes, to grow, you need to take on debt, and the United States government can get money at pretty appealing interest rates. But at this scale, we have to ask: how much of the future are we selling to satisfy the present? Additionally, this debt crisis is not an easy one to solve; the most recent failure being DOGE (for an analysis of this, soon, subscribe).
The problem is that the available solutions are deeply unpopular. Raising taxes on the middle and working classes, cutting entitlement spending, or reforming immigration policy are all political landmines. Popular alternatives like “taxing the rich” don’t scale well; the U.S. already collects a higher share of revenue from the wealthy than many social democracies like Sweden or Norway. Cutting military spending? It's already been halved as a proportion of GDP since the Cold War, even as global threats from China, Russia, and Iran intensify. We are left with a crisis that almost everyone acknowledges but few are willing to tackle honestly, because the electoral costs are immediate while the benefits are deferred.
Long Horizons, Short Attention Spans
Democracy also faces big problems in solving problems that have inherently long time horizons. Climate change is perhaps the most critical example of this dynamic. Greenhouse gas emissions today have consequences a hundred years from now. Due to greenhouse gas feedback loops and tipping points, the damage escalates nonlinearly over time. This makes early action exponentially (literally) more valuable. Yet voters consistently reject policies like carbon taxes, renewable energy investments, or restrictions on fossil fuel use because the costs are immediate, but the benefits are abstract and far off.
Similarly, it struggles to design cities successfully. There’s a reason that American city design (e.g., LA, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Jose, etc, etc…) is so hopelessly dysfunctional when you compare it to cities in China, Japan, and Korea. We have a much more democratic way of determining city design, which leads to many residents opposing new developments. It ironically leads to a more centrally controlled urban design, rather than letting things occur naturally as the market would allocate. This leads to suburban sprawl, expensive housing, and car dependency. This stands in stark contrast to the futuristic, inexpensive, and stunning cities like the picture below of Singapore.
Ultimately, this brings me right back to the conclusion: decisions that shape the distant future must, to some extent, be insulated from the immediate will of the public. That’s not an easy stance to hold alongside a deep belief in liberal democracy or a skepticism of centralized planning. But I don’t see a contradiction. At its core, democracy isn’t just about expressing popular will; it’s about protecting people, especially those least able to protect themselves. And no group is more vulnerable, more voiceless in our political system, than future generations. We owe it to our children, and our children’s children, not to sacrifice the future for convenience today.