I think the “public vs private” take is a false dichotomy. I think there is a decent amount of evidence to show this short-term biases are a general human problem
The fundamental difference with corporations is their finances are regularly examined by professional investors and if they're playing the short term game, their stocks get dumped.
There are people who are aware of the looming fiscal catastrophes of local government, but there's no way to "dump" the stock of them, while efforts are made to obfuscate these liabilities and the heavy influence of public unions pretty much ensure there's no accountability.
Furthermore, it's illegal for corporations to hide this stuff on their accounts, stuff that governments do routinely.
If you can identify a corporation that artificially boosts quarterly profits with short term thinking, and still has a rising stock price year after year, I'd like to hear about it. The ones I know of that did this went right down the sewer shortly after the professional investors discovered it.
The classic example is Enron. They took credit for VOD sales that hadn’t happened but were just optimistic projections. Your point still holds though that there are different checks and balances between public and private organizations. Public checks are at the voting booth, private (publicly traded) companies checks are at the stock exchange. Your claim is no different for public orgs, the time-scale is just different. It’s like challenging for an example of an unsustainable govt keeping its prominence for centuries. Unsustainable practices eventually have their reckoning regardless if they are public or private.
Are there examples of governments hiding account details that are illegal yet allowed to continue once uncovered?
Enron went to zero after their fraud went public.
> Unsustainable practices eventually have their reckoning regardless if they are public or private.
The looming crisis of local government is known, but nobody does a thing about it. Unlike with stocks.
> Public checks are at the voting booth, private (publicly traded) companies checks are at the stock exchange.
There's a huge difference. To change things in government requires a 51% majority vote once every several years. But if you don't like a stock, you can sell it in a millisecond (literally). You don't have to convince anyone else. A vote is not the same thing as a choice.
And when governments become irrevocably insolvent, they fail (as does their fiat currency). It's still very much the same principle just at a more grand scale. Your claim that accounting transparency fixes the issue in private companies is undercut by the fact that the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was essentially defunct because of fraud in the Enron scandal. The watchers weren't doing their job ethically.
>The looming crisis of local government is known, but nobody does a thing about it. Unlike with stocks.
I disagree. You speak as if everyone is on the same page but that's not the case. Take social security in the U.S. as an example. Some will say it's a completely broken system and needs to be done away with. Others think it's solvent by simply modifying the tax base, or by raising the entitlement age, or any combination of factors. The same goes with stocks; sides will argue about whether a specific strategy or earnings result is a death knell or a temporary inconvenience until everybody can finally agree. Both scenarios are systems of human convention and thus solvable by modifying those conventions. Public pensions will follow suit just like private company pensions; when the burden gets too big to bear, the convention will be modified. Some civil servants will be on the short end of the stick, or tax-payers will be overly burdened, or something in between because it's totally a problem of human creation and not beholden to natural laws that can be bent. I've literally witnessed this happen both in private company and public pensions. When tax-payers start to disagree with policies en masse, they can elect the right politicians to fix it. If that's not happening, apparently enough people don't feel it's enough of a problem.
>You don't have to convince anyone else
You absolutely have to find a buyer at the level you want to get out at. Just because the system is fast and automated doesn't mean you can act as a single party. A vote is certainly different because it has the nuances of living in a society (so you can't just get your way because you decided it), but that doesn't negate the intended point that the root of short-term thinking is in human psychology, not the nature of an organization being public or private.
If you want to equate that to needing to convince 51% of the voters, I'll leave the field.
Here's another one. In Seattle, the city has seen enormous growth in tax revenue, far outpacing population growth. But the money just seems to disappear. Where it's going are public employee pensions, which were enacted long ago by politicians to garner the support of the unions. But the math on these is unsustainable and a looming crisis, but the politicians couldn't care less as the bill was far into the future and the election was just around the corner.