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Comment by Alreadyobsolete | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think that these problems won't be solved until there's an obvious, short term incentive for our lawmakers to actually tackle these problems in any tangible way.

The public outcry has been constant for decades. The information and alarmism has existed for just as long. There's no shortage of reasons why we shouldn't tackle these issues. Those in the power to enact significant change to environmental and economic models aren't incentivized to. How do we shift perception to incentivize sustainable growth, rather than growth in isolation. How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term changes rather than short term successes at the cost of finite resources?

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The public outcry that you mention is not even close to large enough.

Sure, everyone is for reducing pollution and against climate change in the abstract, but then in my country coal miners rally (successfully) to avoid their mines getting shut down, drivers complain when car lanes or parking space are replaced with bike lanes or sidewalk, half of the population buys diesel cars to save a few bucks, many go to live in suburbs and plan their life around the car, and people give close to zero weight to environmental proposals in elections.

There are countries with more environmental consciousness than mine (I'm from Spain and sadly it's very far from being a model country in this...), but anyway, public outcry is worthless if it is hypocritical and near the bottom of people's list of priorities.

By the way, the answer to your question is that elections provide a great way of incentivizing long-term thinking in politicians: just don't vote those that don't exhibit it. It's the voters' fault if we don't take that into account and instead vote based on stuff like "unemployment has gone down 2% in the last 4 years" (probably more due to global trends and long-term decisions of previous administrations than to whatever the current one recently did...)

> How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term changes rather than short term successes

Make sure they stay in office for a long time.

Run a patreon style system where sustained long term benefits are rewarded with sustained long term income/rewards to the politicians?

Interesting approach. I'd like to also see a transparent system where campaign funds are kept in escrow until specific goals are achieved, those goals set by the donors

This is a great idea but I'm not sure it will work out.

Numbers are touched up all the time, both in politics (e.g. few governments will admit to lowering the employment rate, if things are not working, usually a new way of counting the unemployed is introduced) and in large companies (managers who report "everything's fine" up the chain until it's too late).

Applied to your idea, donors will have to come up with KPIs to meet. Whatever the situation, the KPIs will magically look good. And if there are no KPIs, nobody will dare take the job.

In my experience, politicians find new ways to massage the numbers but the civil service keeps collecting the old ones. But, I live in quite a democratic country:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/22/britai...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/26/uk-governmen...

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