A society of quarters. Our profoundly sick society.
We have become The Society of Quarters: How Short-Term Reporting Made Us Fragile
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
We live in a society sickened by its own accounting practices. At the root of so many failures — broken grids, massive IT outages, collapsing trust in institutions, demoralized workforces — lies a deceptively simple practice: quarterly financial reporting.
The Illusion of Efficiency
Every three months, executives face the same demand: show growth, cut costs, deliver a number that makes the market cheer. It doesn’t matter if the move is destructive in the long run. Lay off skilled workers? Fine. Cut back on winterizing energy infrastructure? No problem. Ship untested software into production? If it improves this quarter’s margins, it’s rewarded.
The result is a culture of short-term sugar highs — profit spikes that leave the system weaker every time.
The Symptoms of a Sick Society
Infrastructure fragility: Texas froze because regulators and utilities ignored repeated warnings to winterize. The money wasn’t spent because it didn’t “look good this quarter.” People died as a result.
Digital fragility: CrowdStrike pushed a kernel-level update into production without sufficient safeguards. AWS tied half the internet to one region. Both failures came from cutting corners under pressure to move fast and save costs.
Workforce churn: Comcast and others cycle through employees like disposable parts. Fixing churn is expensive up front, even though it pays off in the long run. Quarterly reporting punishes those investments.
Innovation throttling: R&D is gutted because its returns take years. Preventive healthcare is underfunded because the benefits won’t show up next quarter. Public goods are neglected because they don’t pay fast enough.
These aren’t isolated failures. They’re symptoms of the same disease.
The Real Cost
Quarterly short-termism doesn’t save money — it magnifies risk. Every time we skip prevention, the eventual disaster costs ten times more. The AWS outage cost more than multi-region durability would have. The Texas freeze cost more than winterization would have. But the financial system only sees what’s cheap today.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But quarterly reporting has trained our leaders to ignore prevention entirely.
The Cure
We need to end the tyranny of the quarter. That means:
Reducing or eliminating mandatory quarterly financial guidance.
Requiring resilience reporting for critical infrastructure providers.
Tying executive compensation to long-term uptime and stability, not short-term stock price.
Using procurement and insurance incentives to reward durability over corner-cutting.
Closing
A society obsessed with quarters produces fragility: brittle grids, brittle software, brittle jobs. The cycle is predictable: save a penny now, lose a dollar later. Pretend no one could have foreseen it. Repeat.
We can do better. A healthy society looks beyond the next three months. It builds for the next decade. It invests in prevention, values resilience, and treats workers, infrastructure, and trust as more than disposable line items.
Until we change the system of reporting that drives short-term greed, we’ll keep reliving the same preventable tragedies. The Society of Quarters will keep breaking itself. And each time, the cure will cost more than it would have to build resilience in the first place.
To be fair, many argue late state capitalism, but, What we're looking at isn't really capitalism, we're looking down the barrel of a lot of problems caused ultimately by market leader myopia That is itself caused by Short team guidance requirements by the S.E.C. An easy fix would be to change the rules so they're not allowed to do what they're currently required to do so that reporters don't get the information they'd need to write such articles in the first place and end this Sickness, ripping it out at the root.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
We live in a society sickened by its own accounting practices. At the root of so many failures — broken grids, massive IT outages, collapsing trust in institutions, demoralized workforces — lies a deceptively simple practice: quarterly financial reporting.
The Illusion of Efficiency
Every three months, executives face the same demand: show growth, cut costs, deliver a number that makes the market cheer. It doesn’t matter if the move is destructive in the long run. Lay off skilled workers? Fine. Cut back on winterizing energy infrastructure? No problem. Ship untested software into production? If it improves this quarter’s margins, it’s rewarded.
The result is a culture of short-term sugar highs — profit spikes that leave the system weaker every time.
The Symptoms of a Sick Society
Infrastructure fragility: Texas froze because regulators and utilities ignored repeated warnings to winterize. The money wasn’t spent because it didn’t “look good this quarter.” People died as a result.
Digital fragility: CrowdStrike pushed a kernel-level update into production without sufficient safeguards. AWS tied half the internet to one region. Both failures came from cutting corners under pressure to move fast and save costs.
Workforce churn: Comcast and others cycle through employees like disposable parts. Fixing churn is expensive up front, even though it pays off in the long run. Quarterly reporting punishes those investments.
Innovation throttling: R&D is gutted because its returns take years. Preventive healthcare is underfunded because the benefits won’t show up next quarter. Public goods are neglected because they don’t pay fast enough.
These aren’t isolated failures. They’re symptoms of the same disease.
The Real Cost
Quarterly short-termism doesn’t save money — it magnifies risk. Every time we skip prevention, the eventual disaster costs ten times more. The AWS outage cost more than multi-region durability would have. The Texas freeze cost more than winterization would have. But the financial system only sees what’s cheap today.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But quarterly reporting has trained our leaders to ignore prevention entirely.
The Cure
We need to end the tyranny of the quarter. That means:
Reducing or eliminating mandatory quarterly financial guidance.
Requiring resilience reporting for critical infrastructure providers.
Tying executive compensation to long-term uptime and stability, not short-term stock price.
Using procurement and insurance incentives to reward durability over corner-cutting.
Closing
A society obsessed with quarters produces fragility: brittle grids, brittle software, brittle jobs. The cycle is predictable: save a penny now, lose a dollar later. Pretend no one could have foreseen it. Repeat.
We can do better. A healthy society looks beyond the next three months. It builds for the next decade. It invests in prevention, values resilience, and treats workers, infrastructure, and trust as more than disposable line items.
Until we change the system of reporting that drives short-term greed, we’ll keep reliving the same preventable tragedies. The Society of Quarters will keep breaking itself. And each time, the cure will cost more than it would have to build resilience in the first place.
To be fair, many argue late state capitalism, but, What we're looking at isn't really capitalism, we're looking down the barrel of a lot of problems caused ultimately by market leader myopia That is itself caused by Short team guidance requirements by the S.E.C. An easy fix would be to change the rules so they're not allowed to do what they're currently required to do so that reporters don't get the information they'd need to write such articles in the first place and end this Sickness, ripping it out at the root.
