Why we are losing the future of youth, our culture, and 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 preserves us in the remnants of our Soviet heritage.
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 been ongoing in various phases for hundreds of years. We even try to do something about all this, like firefighters rushing to the flames with furious efforts, trying to knock them down, extinguish them in an important building with people inside.
But we almost never shift our focus to what led to this state of affairs. It’s like we’re bewitched. As if an artificial wall has been installed in our heads, preventing us from seeing what all our current problems stand on, 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 invested billions in various directions. Hundreds of grant programs and state projects, yet the paradox I saw then has not disappeared. It has only deepened.
It’s about how social changes are financed.
By businesses, international donors, and even, to a large extent, by non-governmental organizations themselves.
If you look at most programs supporting social initiatives, you can notice a characteristic pattern: the vast majority of resources are directed at addressing the consequences, not working with the causes.
The “artificial wall” I felt in 2014, it turns out, has a very specific name in science. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in “Why Nations Fail” formulated this as the difference between extractive and inclusive institutions. Extractive institutions are not necessarily corruption. It’s any system that redistributes resources in a way that does not create new opportunities, keeping the system afloat but not changing it.
By this logic, a significant part of what we call “aid” works architecturally in an extractive manner. Why? Because the system of incentives is arranged that way.
Let’s look at what is actually being funded
Typical examples of social support look something like this: humanitarian aid, support for victims, short educational programs, cultural events, local infrastructure projects, targeted community assistance.
All this is important. And in wartime conditions, often vitally necessary. But there is one problem.
Much less often are things funded that work with systemic causes: long educational transformations, research of 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 freedom requires reactive investments. The second — proactive. And the latter is almost never systematically funded. At one time, I was so struck by the clarity and transparency of this idea that I even wrote a song with verbatim quotes.
And as much as we sometimes like to think otherwise, this is not a uniquely Ukrainian trait. It’s a global pattern.
But in Ukraine, it takes on a particular sharpness. Because we are not just “another country with problems.” We are still a unique country that simultaneously fights, reforms, decolonizes, and tries not to lose a generation that is growing right now.
And where resources go today will determine what kind of country we wake up to in twenty years.
I offer my perspective on the reasons for these things
In my opinion, the problem is not that businesses or donors “do not understand the importance of the causes.”
There are at least several mechanisms that push all actors towards short action horizons:
1. The logic of quick results
Any organization must explain what it has done with its resources. For businesses, it’s shareholders, for donors, it’s taxpayers, and for funds, it’s their donors (in most cases, governments of other countries and, accordingly, the taxpayers of these countries, their citizens). Therefore, projects where results can be shown quickly are supported: how many people received help, how many children received education, how many buildings were restored, how many programs were conducted.
But systemic changes work quite differently. Their results appear over years, are difficult to measure, and are not tied to a single donor — of course, such investments almost always appear too risky! Mariana Mazzucato in “The Entrepreneurial State” showed that even in the technological sector (where the connection between long 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? Uh-huh. I thought so too 🙂 . But all of this was actually funded by the state, because the market could not afford a 20-year horizon. If this is true even for technologies, what about social changes?
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 is evolutionarily better at responding to a specific human story than to statistics or complex systems. A single child with a name and face gathers 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. We find it easier to help a specific veteran, school, or 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 replicate itself. Partners, procedures, grant formats, social expectations emerge, and the system begins to operate by inertia.
Douglas North, another Nobel laureate, called this “path dependence” — the dependence on paths already taken. Institutions tend to move in the direction they are already going, even if that direction is far from optimal. The cost of changing course always seems higher than the cost of continuing (try even whispering that the “New Ukrainian School” (NUS) reform has taken us in the wrong direction now). This way, dozens of forums, conferences, short programs, and grant competitions are born, but long intellectual programs that change the way of thinking, not just behavior within the existing mindset, are born much less frequently.
How International Donors Behave
Formally, most international aid is not humanitarian. According to OECD data, humanitarian aid constitutes about 10-15% of international programs. The main portion of resources is directed toward development programs.
But there’s 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, a program needs to be launched, competitions announced, tenders conducted, grants implemented, 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 is a brilliant image in its simplicity — planners think in big top-down strategies, but real work gets fragmented into thousands of short projects. And searchers — those who find solutions from the bottom up — rarely receive long-term support because they don’t fit reporting formats. As a result, most development programs become a series of short interventions rather than a long transformation.
Elinor Ostrom, 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 need time, which the project cycle doesn’t provide them.
One of the biggest discoveries in my project management programs for organizations is that project activity is perpendicular to organizational processes. Due to its focus on results, a project drains all resources from the surrounding organizational environment and does not contribute to the sustainability of the organization unless its interventions in the fabric of your company are controlled at the organizational process level.
Why War Further Shortens the Horizon
War shifts society into survival mode.
When safety and resources are in question, what Sandhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir described as a “scarcity mindset” emerges. When there’s a lack of resources—time, money, security—the brain automatically narrows its focus to immediate threats. This provides tactical efficiency but at the expense of strategic blindness. This black-and-white binary emerges. People and institutions concentrate on urgent problems (which is natural because it’s hard to justify funding cultural research when drones need to be purchased), but they cut off their impact on systemic issues. Thus, the planning horizon becomes even shorter.
And it’s precisely during war that decisions are made that will define the country for decades.
And here I really like how Nassim Taleb described a similar dynamic. “Anti-fragility in reverse”: a system that only reacts to shocks becomes not stronger but more dependent on the next shock. From his description, it follows very clearly that without investment in deep resilience, each new crisis will require even more resources to eliminate the consequences.
I see this every week. I see the smartest people in the country burning out while extinguishing fires—and they neither have the time nor the resources to think about building something that doesn’t burn. Okay, I understand that the system doesn’t give them this choice, but they often don’t think it exists.
The Main Paradox
This results in a systemic trap. Society continually invests in mitigating consequences but invests little in the conditions that generate these consequences.
We fight educational problems but invest little in teacher preparation (look at the teachers of the New Ukrainian School and find 10 differences in the broad statistical field from non-NUS teachers).
We respond to informational attacks but invest little in cultural policy (counteraction and counter-propaganda are heard from every iron, but our own Game isn’t being deployed because there aren’t even those who understand that such a Game can exist).
We fight corruption but work little with institutional incentives.
Joseph Stiglitz identified this very clearly as a “systemic coordination failure”: each actor acts rationally within their own bounds, but the sum of these rational actions creates an irrational result for the whole system. The causes remain without investment precisely because no one can operate within existing incentives.
Who Can Fund Long-Term Changes
And here a very uncomfortable question arises.
Looking at the history of different countries, long-term changes were funded by only a few types of actors:
– the state,
– large national funds,
– elites within society.
These are the actors that can afford a 10–30 year horizon.
The Finnish educational reform took 40 years (from first experiments in the 1970s to results that surprised the world in the 2000s), Singapore (don’t throw stones at me, the example is contentious in the moral dimension but illustrative) built its institutional system over three decades, and ultimately the Korean cultural project (the 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 similar, no CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) department in business measures time in such categories.
Ukrainian Problem
A complex configuration has developed in Ukraine.
The state is institutionally weak. There are almost no large national funds (UCF, Veterans Fund, NFRDU, Ukrainian Book Institute, and others are a weak shadow of what large national funds should be, and even our small ones have the same project ceiling issues).
The business is relatively young and has not yet created a tradition of strategic philanthropy (try taking our business clubs and talking with their key participants about funding such initiatives for 10 years, you will hear interesting justifications for impossibility/other priorities and other important aspects of fate). Thus, naturally, the system leans towards short help cycles, and the long horizon simply falls out of the decision economy.
And here arises the most important contradiction:
Ukraine is at a point where it most needs long investments—in education, culture, institutions, thinking—but the entire funding architecture works against this.
I see this from the standpoint of a person who has been building educational and cultural projects for ten years and from the standpoint of a person who writes grant proposals and knows what this machine looks like from the inside. The grant proposal format is not a neutral tool. It’s a framing of thought. And this frame systematically excludes everything that doesn’t fit into the logic of “results in 18 months” (I won’t talk about donors’ perspective as a whole—that’s a topic for another post).
Main Question
The world has learned very well how to save people in crises (well, or so it thinks), but it has learned significantly worse how to invest in conditions where these crises cease to arise.
And here arises the key question for Ukraine. If long-term changes are not financed by markets or international donors, who should finance them?
And the answer that has historically appeared in different countries is always the same: the society itself. Through its institutions, its universities, its cultural projects, its people who are ready to work with a horizon of not one grant but one generation.
You already know my love for metaphors and perhaps are a bit used to it. I won’t resist this time 🙂.
Imagine a beautiful developed city 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 systemic architects with good education and caring souls. No one is designing buildings that do not catch fire, considering fire-resistant materials, planning, and safety systems. No one works on the causes of fires.
And every year the city spends more on firefighters and less remains for architects. Because fires do not wait, of course.
We live in a “firefighter economy.”
Firefighters are necessary, and everyone understands that without them, the city would burn down right now. But without systemic architects, it will always burn.
I’ve heard phrases like “we are at war, it’s 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 Victory as close as possible.
Only which Victory do we refer to with a capital letter? Surely, it’s not about a scorched, waterlogged city that’s uninhabitable? It’s about something else, right?
We have to live here, and so do our children. Just days after the great Victory, there will come a Monday when we will ask ourselves: “So, what has been done, and what do we start with?” And there’s a significant chance we will have to start from scratch in many directions.
Therefore, the main question for Ukraine, in my opinion, is not how to find more firefighters, but who will become the architects, and who will support them. Who today, in the midst of war, will begin designing a country that won’t require eternal rescuing.
Because rescuing is important, but it’s about tactics, and designing the future is about strategy. One will never be without the other, but one will never replace the other.
Illustration: The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J. M. W. Turner
REFERENCES FOR THE TEXT:
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.
