Comment by bloppe 2 days ago
To be fair, businesses should assume that customers actually "want" what they create demand for. In the case of misleading or dangerously addictive products, regulation should fall to government, because that's the only actor that can prevent a race to the bottom.
Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it? If you take that attitude, why even go to "work" or run a "business"? It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
which is exactly what the law of the jungle is. And guess who sits at the top within that regime?
Humans would devolve back into that, if not for the violence enforcement from the state. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the state to make sure regulations are sound to prevent the stab-stab-stab, not the responsibility of the individual to not take advantage of a situation that would have been advantageous to take.
This is gross; I would not want to live in a society of these kinds of people.
> I would not want to live in a society of these kinds of people.
of course not. Nobody does.
However, what happened to your civic responsibility to keep such a society to make it function? Why is that not ever mentioned?
The fact is, gov't regulation does need to be comprehensive and thorough to ensure that individual incentives are completely aligned, so that law of the jungle doesn't take hold. And it is up to each individual, who do not have the power in a jungle, to collectively ensure that society doesn't devolve back into that, rather than to expect that the powerful would be moral/ethical and rely on their altruism.
I'll indulge your straw man because it's actually pretty good at illustrating my point. 99.9% of people are not psychopaths. But you only need .1% of people to be psychopaths. In a world where you get $5 and no threat of prosecution for stabbing people, you can bet that there will be extremely efficient and effective stabbing companies run by those psychopaths. Even normal people who don't like stabbing others would see the psychopaths getting rich and think to themselves "well, everyone's getting stabbed anyway, I might as well make some money too". That's what a race to the bottom is.
And that's why the government regulates stabbing.
In the behavioral science (of which economics should be a sub-field of) this is called perverse intensives. A core-feature of capitalism, is that if you don‘t abandon your morals and maximize your profits at somebody else’s expense, you will soon be out-competed by those who will.
*incentives
I tried to let it stand because it was clear what you meant, but ultimately could not.
> Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it?
Not all people everywhere, but most successful businesspeople.
> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
It isn't though? If you do that then you get locked up and lose the money, so the smart psychopaths go into business instead.
The folks who succeed most in business are the type who have an intuition for what's best. They're not some automaton reading too far into and amplifying the imperfect and shallow signals of "demand" in a marketplace.