Short-term profit incentives override distant and slowly accumulating environmental harms
Evidence
A variety of conditions, some of which are documented by Wenk (1979), foster a foreshortened perspective when it comes to environmental practices. The immediate, bountiful rewards of high-consumption lifestyles easily can override distant adverse effects, especially if those effects accumulate slowly. Many of those effects are unanticipated and, to make matters worse, some are irreversible. The incentive systems of many business organizations are strongly oriented toward practices that bring profits in the short term. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2546
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- ADDENDUM: Relates to costs of foreshortened perspective analysis in current systems — parallels the mechanism of moral disengagement via displaced responsibility.
Related
- Immediate rewards override distant slowly accumulating environmental harms (similarity 0.93)
- Environmental policymaking systematically discounts distant-future and foreign benefits against present domestic costs (similarity 0.80)
- Consumption resists change because it is profitable and shielded from environmental costs (similarity 0.80)
- Market-driven consumer economics omits environmental costs from its calculations (similarity 0.79)
- Environmentally sustainable futures require norm-changing values, not incremental fixes (similarity 0.78)