Cuomo gets credit for responding to a surge. Newsome gets less credit for preventing a surge. London Breed? Rarely mentioned.

Completely unrelated: You can get promoted at tech companies for heroics during outages! Less so for preventing. Even less for designs that avoid them.

By default we reward good decisions that we can see. Outages are highly visible.

Score = Good Actions x Visibility

You can get a high score just by increasing visibility. It's easy to get 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more visibility but it's hard to make a 100X better decision

Even worse than not being recognized, the "preventers" are often actively punished! If they are successful, then their actions seem unnecessary. Our cultures often view them as blockers, or slow.

We should all be aware of this perverse incentive, and actively work against it.