[JohnBooty]

   It's a system explicitly designed to be short-sighted.

I'm not sure what else we'd call a system where elected officials have zero incentive to do anything other than look good for their re-election campaign in a few years.

Clearly, many politicians have gone above and beyond that and accomplished useful things. But there is zero incentive baked into the system for them to do so.

   Democracy was designed to avoid dictators/kings and other really bad things :)

It's good at that when implemented well, though most aren't.

Generally it seems you wind up with oligarchs/corporations effectively owning politicians unless there is an extreme level of vigilance, etc.

   But experience with communism/central-planning, suggests 
   that maybe it's best to optimize for the short term. At 
   least that works, and produces results in the meantime.

This is a false dichotomy. Clearly there are things that benefit from a short-term, MVP-style, iterative approach.

There are also clearly things that benefit from a longer view: climate change, infrastructure, etc.

[jopsen]

> I'm not sure what else we'd call a system where elected officials have zero incentive to do anything other than look good for their re-election campaign in a few years.

We call it a side effect. Democracy certainly wasn't designed with short sightedness in mind. That's a side effect of the far more important design goals around preventing abuse of power.

Democracy may be short-sighted, but not by design, rather as a side effect of the design.

Assuming we buy the idea that democracy is indeed short sighted.

Every considered that as long as democracy avoids establishment of dictators/kings, repression and the unavoidable civil wars that follow, then given time free market forces will produce good results.

One could reasonable argue democracy is just very very long sighted.

> Generally it seems you wind up with oligarchs/corporations effectively owning politicians

This isn't new, and yet we have built infrastructure before. Fought world wars. Irradiated deceases. Walked on the moon.

On the scales of history large corporations tend to slide into irrelevance over time.

The tech giants of today, will be rubber barons of tomorrow. Sure we might seem them around in the future. But a hundred years from now they might not seem so big.