What it looks like
Imagine a twenty-year effort funded one year at a time. An annual report may need to show useful progress without pretending the final outcome has already arrived. This is an illustration of the time mismatch, not an estimate of typical grant length.
Why it happens
Short funding and reporting cycles may favor results that arrive sooner. Whether they systematically do so is the hypothesis to test. Future people can’t donate, vote or write a thank-you letter. Humanity’s Checklist adds that we can’t build a future we can’t see: without a shared, compelling picture of where we are going, nothing pulls money toward the long game.
This is a hypothesis
Charitology’s working claim is that the system’s timescale is shorter than the timescale of its problems. This page does not provide a sector-wide test of that claim. And how much the future should count is a real moral question, taken up in Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future.
No one is to blame
Wanting to see results is reasonable. It just shouldn’t be the only thing that decides what gets funded.
The system funds work on the timescale of the problem, and future people’s interests get a voice when money is allocated.