[andrewflnr]

It's tricky, because there's genuine uncertainty about whether you have prevented a fire, or just wasted some time and maybe added some overhead. Even people who understand a system deeply can have reasonable disagreements about whether a preventative measure is worthwhile. Executives whose only interaction with the system is feeding it money have almost no chance of figuring it out in the face of any amount of conflicting info. And of course a mixture of natural human optimism, aka blithe disregard of danger, and having their salary depend on believing there are easy things to cut, makes it quite difficult for them to believe in any particular instance of a fire prevented.

I hope it's clear that I don't mean to excuse them for giving up. It's hugely destructive both for decision makers and everyone around them. I just want to show that the problem is substantially harder than "just reward preventing fires already".