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People invest a lot of intellect and energy to create a scheme which provides immediate gratification but whose cost can be deferred long into the future.

Soon people who perpetuate such a scheme and those buying into it believe their comfortable illusion, immediate benefit, but deferred cost. Actually, cost deferred long into the future is easily morphed into the perception of no cost. Such a selectively truncated perception of reality is actually no different from a utopia, the world which cannot exist in the real world.

Being smart and intelligent does not guarantee that a person would do a good job. With smarts and intelligence, a person could develop a strong temptation to cheat the reality, or cheat death. Perpetual motion is one great example. Socialism is another.

Without thorough mechanism of verification and fact-checking, people have been always doing it since the dawn of history. Especially, in the field dealing with complex phenomena where there are also many unknowns.