Discounting the future

We manage physical things on a decision horizon that is structurally shorter than their lifespan. Every single choice to ignore that gap is defensible, and the sum of those choices is a collapsing bridge. This paper fixes that mechanism, shows across two cases that it is general, and places it inside a larger idea: this is not short-sightedness, it is a unit error.

The problem, concrete

A small owners’ association in a post-war housing block receives a letter. The wooden pile foundation under the block, driven in the 1950s, has been left dry by a fallen groundwater table and is beginning to rot. Repair costs between 50,000 and 100,000 euro per home, more than the association has saved in thirty years. No one did anything wrong. Every annual meeting that kept the reserve low to keep the monthly contribution affordable made a defensible bookkeeping decision. The bill falls now, on residents who did not cause the problem, while the generation that passed it on can no longer be held to account.

This is not an incident. It is a mechanism, and it repeats at every scale. The gap is this: the term on which we decide is shorter than the lifespan of what we manage. A building stands for sixty years and is governed on an annual budget. A lock or a bridge lasts a century and is maintained on an electoral cycle. The climate system works on centuries and is governed on election terms. Call it horizon compression. The benefits are now, the costs are later, and the decision-maker is almost never the one who gets the bill.

Who feels this

The resident sees a levy that exceeds his savings for a problem that formed under his house before he lived there. The association board member, a volunteer, has to force a collective into an expense that only pays off years later and raises the monthly charge in the meantime, and gets voted down if he puts it on the agenda too early. The road authority knows exactly which of its bridges are approaching the end of their lifespan, but only gets replacement funded once there is a failure, not when it wants to prevent one. And the future resident, the party with the largest stake, sits at no table at all, because he does not yet exist.

The pattern beneath all these perspectives is the same. Everyone acts rationally within his own term, and precisely because of that, no one attends to the term that matters.

Why the existing answers fall short

Short-term thinking is the usual charge, and it falls short because it implies a character flaw where there is a systemic property. People are not more foolish than before. The incentives are set so that deferral always wins. Sustainability discourse falls short at the other end, because it is so broad that everything fits inside it, nature, energy, biodiversity, circularity, and no instrument comes out of it. And the pure engineering approach treats it as a technical maintenance problem, while at its core it is a question of allocation and governance: not how you replace a pile, but who pays when for something no one formally owns.

Beneath all these shortcomings lies one and the same error. We reckon with a tractable measure that crowds out the real one. A building is managed on this year’s budget line, not on its lifespan. A transition is governed on the tonne of CO2, countable and tradeable, while the material flows beneath it, mining, refining, foundations, concrete, stay out of view. The measurable proxy crowds out the unmeasurable reality, and what went uncounted turns out to be constitutive. That is Goodhart’s law at system scale. What is missing is not technique and not morality, but an instrument that forces a collective to reckon in the unit that counts.

The wrong unit

Here lies the load-bearing idea, and it is wider than Keystone. The public debate about the physical world is conducted in the wrong units. Not in deep time, energy density, material flows or welfare per euro, but in budget years, electoral cycles and news cycles. That is the theme of a separate book, Thinking in the Right Units, and horizon compression is its sharpest case: the wrong unit of time. We decide in the unit of the administrator, while the object has its own unit, a lifespan of decades to a century. As long as those two do not coincide, every single decision is correct and the outcome is a ruin.

Seen this way, short-sightedness is not a vice but a measurement error. That distinction is not cosmetic. A vice you fight with morality, and morality moves no one. A measurement error you correct with an instrument that forces the reckoning into the right unit. And such an instrument exists.

The diagnosis as an instrument

It exists already, small and unnoticed, in Dutch law: the statutory multi-year maintenance plan, the MJOP. It obliges an owners’ association to build a reserve for costs that fall decades out. It is, without being named as such, intergenerational cost allocation under uncertainty, and it forces the reckoning into the unit of the building rather than that of the budget year. That is exactly what climate adaptation asks. The bridge between property management and climate is not a rhetorical find, it is already in the law, and the legislator is strengthening it. A bill to accelerate the sustainability and maintenance of owners’ associations, in consultation in mid 2026, extends the MJOP from ten to thirty years, requires a sustainability section, and lowers the voting threshold for sustainability decisions to a simple majority. The horizon is thus being pulled open with the law in hand.

Keystone is the pillar that names and generalises this mechanism. The claim is not that foundations, roads, bridges, drought and retrofitting are five subjects that happen to be physical. It is that they are manifestations of one mechanism, horizon compression, and that what solves them has the same shape: a forced extension of the horizon, from budget year to lifespan. Two cases prove the claim is general and does not hang on a single sector.

The first is the foundation crisis. Groundwater tables lowered by drought leave wooden pile foundations dry, after which they rot. The Dutch foundation-problems knowledge centre, KCAF, estimates that roughly half a million homes currently have foundation problems, that this rises towards some 800,000 by 2050, and that over the longer term up to about a million homes are at risk. Total damage is estimated at around sixty billion euro by 2050, with repair costs of 50,000 to well over 100,000 euro per home, sums that exceed the reserve of almost every small association. Since 2024 a national foundations programme has been running, for which fifty-six million euro has been allocated through the end of 2028, spread across a handful of pilot areas. Set against the estimated damage, that is the ratio between what we spend on prevention and what the bill becomes. In this single case, climate, collective ownership, deferred maintenance and administrative incapacity coincide, and it is not abstract: it is happening in existing Dutch neighbourhoods, now.

The second is the asset base of Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch national infrastructure agency. It manages roughly 3,700 bridges and viaducts; the research institute TNO calculated that replacing those alone costs sixteen billion euro. A large share dates from the post-war reconstruction and the decades after, and therefore reaches the end of its designed lifespan at the same time. In late 2025 Rijkswaterstaat published its multi-year overview of the renewal task for bridges, tunnels and locks for 2026 to 2030, and calls it the largest maintenance task in its history. The same organisation that famously built the Delta Works turns out to find maintaining them harder to organise than building them was. It is the same pattern as the owners’ association, only at the scale of the state, and it shows that the mechanism does not hang on scale or on form of ownership.

Why this matters

Once you see deferred maintenance, infrastructure ageing and climate adaptation as one unit problem, what you can build changes. You no longer look for a separate solution per file, you look for instruments that force the reckoning into the unit of the object, and in the MJOP you already have one that works and that the legislator is now extending. That is the generative side. Not to denounce that the future gets discounted, but to show the instrument that discounts it back.

And it explains why Keystone is a keystone and not a sixth subject. Limbic Literacy addresses horizon compression at the neurological level: the stimulus is now, the costs are later, and the architecture is designed to exploit that difference. Keystone addresses the same pattern in concrete and soil: the pleasure is now, the bill is for whoever is not yet here. In the one the horizon is compressed to seconds, in the other to a budget year. It is the same error twice, twice in a different unit, and the climate debate itself, conducted in tribal units rather than in time and matter, is its third manifestation. The one protects the human being against the compression of his own horizon, the other the physical world against the compression of ours. Navigating presupposes a horizon. These are the mechanisms that systematically shorten it, and that is why these stones close the arch.

Sources

• KCAF (Kennis Centrum Aanpak Funderingsproblematiek), foundation risk and drought: estimates of roughly half a million homes now, rising towards 800,000 to a million, and around sixty billion euro of damage by 2050.
• Dutch Association of Insurers / Delta Plan for Foundation Damage; Deltares, low groundwater levels threaten foundations.
• National foundations programme (since 2024), fifty-six million euro through end 2028.
• Rijkswaterstaat, multi-year overview of the renewal task for bridges, tunnels and locks 2026-2030 (published December 2025); TNO, sixteen billion euro to replace some 3,700 bridges and viaducts.
• Bill to accelerate the sustainability and maintenance of owners’ associations, in consultation mid 2026 (MJOP from ten to thirty years, mandatory sustainability section, simple majority for sustainability decisions).
• Conceptual frame: the author’s own book project Thinking in the Right Units (reasoning in a problem’s native units: deep time, energy, material flows, welfare per euro), and the proxy-substitution analysis from the raw-materials and climate work.