Why we are losing the future of youth, our culture, and the chances to break out of the vicious circle.
Back in 2014, when I started actively traveling around Ukraine and visiting cities and towns I had never been to, I noticed this strange paradox that keeps us trapped in the remnants of the Soviet legacy.
We talk a lot about bad roads, lack of funding for the army, corruption in government bodies, idiots who come to power at various levels, the war with Moscow, which has lasted in different phases for hundreds of years. We even try to do something about all of this, like firefighters rushing into the flames with furious efforts, trying to put it out, extinguish it on an important building with people.
But we almost never shift our focus to what led to this state of affairs. As if it’s been done to us. As if an artificial wall has been installed in our minds that prevents us from seeing what underpins all our current problems, realizing that the vast majority of these problems are consequences of much larger and more complex processes.
More than ten years have passed since then. A full-scale war began, thousands of volunteer initiatives were created, we received billions in international aid, our businesses got involved with Ukrainian billions in various directions. Hundreds of grant programs and state projects, but the paradox I saw then has not disappeared. It has only deepened.
It’s about how social changes are funded.
By businesses, international donors, and even, to a significant extent, by the NGOs themselves.
If we look at most support programs for social initiatives, we can notice a characteristic pattern: the vast majority of resources are directed at overcoming consequences rather than addressing root causes.
The “artificial wall” I felt in 2014 turns out to have a specific name in science. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in “Why Nations Fail” formulated it as the difference between extractive and inclusive institutions. Extractive institutions are not necessarily corruption. They are any system that redistributes resources in a way that does not create new opportunities, keeping the system afloat but not changing it.
According to this logic, a significant part of what we call “aid” works in an extractive way by its very architecture. Why? Because the system of incentives is set up this way.
Let’s look at what is actually being funded
Typical examples of social support look approximately like this: humanitarian aid, support for those affected, short educational programs, cultural events, local infrastructure projects, community-targeted assistance.
All of this is important. And in wartime conditions, often vital. But there is one problem.
Far less frequently are things funded that address systemic causes: long-term educational transformations, research on social processes, projects with a clear theory of change, cultural institutions, intellectual platforms, experiments with new development models. That is, investments in what changes the very architecture of society, not just its symptoms.
Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, described this as the difference between two types of freedom. There is “freedom from” — from hunger, from disease, from danger. And there is “freedom to” — to develop, to participate, to build the future. The first type of freedom requires reactive investments. The second — proactive. And it is the latter that almost no one systematically funds. At one time, I was so struck by the clarity and simplicity of this idea that I even wrote a song with verbatim quotes.
And as much as we sometimes wish to believe otherwise, this is not a uniquely Ukrainian issue. It is a global pattern.
However, in Ukraine, it takes on particular urgency. Because we are not just “another country with problems.” We are a unique country simultaneously waging war, reforming, decolonizing, and striving not to lose a generation that is growing right now.
And where resources go today will determine what kind of country we wake up in twenty years from now.
I offer my perspective on the causes of these issues
In my opinion, the problem is not that businesses or donors “do not understand the importance of causes.”
There are at least several mechanisms that push all actors toward short-term actions:
1. The logic of quick results
Any organization must explain what exactly it has done with resources. For businesses — it’s shareholders, for donors — it’s taxpayers, and for funds — their benefactors (in most cases, the governments of other countries and, accordingly, taxpayers of those countries, their citizens). Therefore, projects where results can be shown quickly are supported: how many people received help, how many children were educated, how many buildings were restored, how many programs conducted.
But systemic changes work entirely differently. Their results appear over years, are difficult to measure, and are not tied to one donor — of course, such investments almost always seem too risky! Mariana Mazzucato in “The Entrepreneurial State” showed that even in the technological sector (where the connection between long-term investments and results is obvious), private capital systematically avoids fundamental research. Do you think the creation of the internet, GPS, and touch screens was funded by business? Yeah, I thought so too 🙂. But all this was actually funded by the state, because the market could not afford a 20-year horizon. If this is true even for technology, what can be said about social change?
2. The psychology of “visible good”
Social psychology well describes another effect. People are much more willing to support a specific story than an abstract system.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described this as the “identifiable victim effect.” The brain evolutionarily responds better to a specific human story than to statistics or a complex system. One child with a name and face raises more donations than a million nameless ones. Paul Slovic, a colleague of Kahneman, called this “psychic numbing”: the larger the scale of the problem, the less we are able to emotionally comprehend it. It is easier for us to help a specific veteran, a specific school, or a specific child than to finance education reform, cultural policy, or institutional research.
3. Institutional Inertia
Once a certain type of program is launched, it begins to reproduce itself. Partners, procedures, grant formats, and societal expectations emerge, and the system starts to operate on inertia.
Douglas North, another Nobel laureate, called this “path dependence.” Institutions tend to move in the direction they are already heading, even if that direction is far from optimal. The cost of changing course always seems higher than the cost of continuation (try just whispering now that the New Ukrainian School reform has led us astray). This is how dozens of forums, conferences, short programs, and grant competitions are born. But long intellectual programs, which change the way of thinking and not just behavior within existing thinking, are much rarer.
How International Donors Behave
Formally, most international aid is not humanitarian. According to OECD data, humanitarian aid accounts for approximately 10–15% of international programs. The main portion of resources is directed toward development programs.
But here is an important nuance. Even development programs have a short horizon.
The typical architecture of international aid looks like this:
– organization strategy — 5–7 years;
– country program — 4–5 years;
– specific project — 18–36 months.
Since projects are the real unit of work, the actual intervention horizon is 2–3 years.
During this time, the program must be launched, competitions announced, tenders conducted, grants implemented, and reports prepared. And the system starts the next cycle again.
William Easterly in “The White Man’s Burden” described this dynamic as a conflict between “planners” and “searchers.” This image is brilliant in its simplicity — planners think in big top-down strategies, but the real work breaks down into thousands of short projects. And searchers — those who find solutions from below — rarely get long-term support because they do not fit into reporting formats. As a result, most development programs become a series of short interventions rather than a long transformation.
Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel laureate in economics, proved that the most sustainable institutions arise from the bottom — through community self-organization, not through external project funding. But such institutions require time, which the project cycle does not give them.
One of the greatest discoveries in my project management programs for organizations is that project activities are perpendicular to organizational processes. Projects, due to their focus on results, drain all resources from the surrounding organizational environment and do not contribute to the sustainability of the organization if their interventions in the fabric of your company are not controlled at the level of organizational processes.
Why War Further Shortens the Horizon
War shifts society into survival mode.
When safety and resources are in question, what Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir described as a “scarcity mindset” emerges. When resources are scarce—time, money, safety—the brain automatically narrows its focus to the nearest threats. This provides tactical efficiency but at the cost of strategic blindness. A black-and-white binary emerges. People and institutions concentrate on urgent problems (and this is natural because it’s impossible to justify funding cultural research when there’s a need to purchase drones), but they cut off their own influence on systemic problems. Thus, the planning horizon becomes even shorter.
Yet it is during war that decisions are made which will define the country for decades.
Here, I really like how Nassim Taleb described a similar dynamic: “antifragility in reverse.” A system that only reacts to shocks does not become stronger but more dependent on the next shock. From his description, it becomes clear that without investments in deep resilience, each new crisis will require even more resources to mitigate its consequences.
I see this every week. I see the smartest people in the country spending themselves on firefighting—and having neither the time nor the resources to think about building something that won’t burn. Well, okay, I understand that the system leaves them no choice, but they often don’t realize that one exists.
The Main Paradox
This results in a systemic trap. Society constantly invests in mitigating consequences but almost never in the conditions that generate these consequences.
We fight educational problems but invest little in teacher training (look at the NUS teachers and find 10 differences in the broad statistical field with non-NUS teachers).
We respond to informational attacks but invest little in cultural policy (counter-propaganda is touted everywhere, yet no one plays the game because there are few who understand such a game might exist).
We fight corruption but work little with institutional incentives.
Joseph Stiglitz identified this clearly as a “systemic coordination failure”: each actor acts rationally within their limits, but the sum of these rational actions creates an irrational outcome for the entire system. Reasons remain without investments because no one can—within the existing incentives.
Who Can Fund Long-Term Changes
And here comes a very uncomfortable question.
Looking at the history of various countries, long-term changes have been funded by only a few types of actors:
– the state,
– large national funds,
– elites within society.
These actors can afford a horizon of 10–30 years.
Finland’s educational reform took 40 years (from the first experiments in the 1970s to the results that surprised the world in the 2000s), Singapore (controversial as a moral example, but illustrative) built its institutional system over three decades, and eventually, the Korean cultural project (the very one that gives us BTS and Korean cinema today) was launched in the 1990s as a state strategy. Not to mention Hollywood and contemporary art in the USA.
No grant cycle of 18 months can create anything like this, no CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) department in business measures time in such categories.
The Ukrainian Problem
A complex configuration has developed in Ukraine.
The state is institutionally weak. There are almost no large national funds (UCF, Veterans Fund, National Research Foundation of Ukraine, Ukrainian Book Institute, and others – they are a faint shadow of what large national funds should be, and even our small ones have the same project ceiling problems).
The business is relatively young and has not yet established a tradition of strategic philanthropy (try taking our business clubs and talking to their key participants about funding such initiatives for 10 years — there will be very interesting justifications of impossibility/other priorities and other important aspects of fate). Therefore, the system naturally leans towards short aid cycles, and the long horizon simply falls out of the decision economy.
And this is where the most important contradiction arises:
Ukraine is at a point where it most needs long-term investments — in education, culture, institutions, thinking, but the entire funding architecture works against this.
I see this both from the position of a person who has been building educational and cultural projects for ten years and from the position of a person who writes grant applications and knows how this machine looks from the inside. The format of a grant application is not a neutral tool. It is a framework of thinking. And this framework systematically excludes everything that does not fit into the logic of “results in 18 months” (I won’t speak about the overall optics of donors — this is the topic of a separate post).
Main Question
The world has learned very well how to save people in crises (or so it seems), but it has learned much worse how to invest in the conditions in which these crises cease to arise.
And here the key question for Ukraine arises. If neither markets nor international donors fund long-term changes, who should finance them?
And the answer that has historically appeared in different countries is always the same: society itself. Through its institutions, its universities, its cultural projects, its people who are willing to work with a horizon not of one grant, but of one generation.
You already know my love for metaphors and perhaps have gotten a bit used to it. I won’t resist this time either 🙂.
Imagine a beautiful developed city that’s on fire.
In this city, there are brave and professional firefighters. They are courageous, they save people, they extinguish building after building. No one doubts their importance.
But in this city, there are almost no systematic architects with a good education and a caring soul. No one designs buildings that don’t ignite, considers fire-resistant materials, planning, or security systems. No one addresses the causes of fires.
And each year, the city spends more on firefighters and less on architects. Because fires do not wait, of course.
We live in a “firefighters’ economy.”
Firefighters are necessary, and everyone understands that without them, the city will burn right now. But without systematic architects, it will always burn.
I have heard the phrases “we are at war, it is not the time,” “we have other priorities” from hundreds of people over the past years in my conversations about educational and cultural initiatives.
Of course, our task now is to survive. To bring about and achieve Victory.
Only about which Victory do we speak with a capital letter? It’s not about the burned-out, waterlogged city that’s uninhabitable, is it? It’s about something else, right?
We and our children have to live here too. After the great Victory, literally within a few days, that Monday will come when we ask ourselves, “So, what’s already done, and where do we start?” And there’s a very high chance that in many areas, we’ll be starting from scratch.
And that’s why the main question for Ukraine, as I see it, is not how to find even more firefighters, but who will become the architects and who will support them. Who, even now amidst the war, will begin to design a country that won’t require eternal rescuing?
Because saving is important, but it’s about tactics, and designing the future is about strategy. And one will never exist without the other, but one can never replace the other.
Illustration: The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J. M. W. Turner
REFERENCES:
1. Acemoglu, D., Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Business.
2. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.
3. Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press. [revised edition: Penguin, 2018.]
4. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
5. Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
6. Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.
7. Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., Slovic, P. (2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 143–153.
8. North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press.
9. Easterly, W. (2006). The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press.
10. Easterly, W. (2001). The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. MIT Press.
11. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
12. Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents. W. W. Norton.
13. Stiglitz, J. E. (2001). Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics [Nobel Prize lecture]. The American Economic Review, 92(3), 460–501.
14. Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books / Henry Holt.
15. Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.
16. Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House.
17. OECD (2023). Development Co-operation Report 2023: Debating the Aid System. OECD Publishing.
Additional sources:
– Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
– Banerjee, A. V., Duflo, E. (2011). Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. PublicAffairs.
– Moyo, D. (2009). Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
– Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248.
– Perez, C. (2002). Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. Edward Elgar.
– Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Farrar & Rinehart.
