They make their short term gains that they congratulate their cleverness for, then suffer the consequences, and those that survive are the ones that re-learn the lessons of old.
But on the other hand, it's sometimes the only way to get the old method out of the way so that new efficiencies can be gained with the technologies available today. Of course most will fail, but some will survive.
Shoot first, ask questions later.
Making the problem bigger is an interesting way to go about it. I will grant that doing so does expand the number of people impacted, and therefore the number of people interested in solving the problem is also bigger, as well, perhaps, as the apparent pay off for solving it. But ultimately, the solution is going to be something that could have been applied by the same people who expanded the size of the problem.
Chesterton finds himself surrounded by fences which have no articulated justification, but which might be necessary/justifiable. This is a predicament of his own making. If he and everyone else in the town always bulldozed any fence they came across which doesn’t have a justification, people who want fences would start writing down why they’d put them there.
This would be helpful, because not only will it tell us which fences shouldn’t be torn down. It would tell us which fences we should actively maintain.
It's the same reason we study history, to know what came before us so that we can make good decisions going forward.