Firms are actually better than governments at internalizing costs across time. Asset values incorporate the potential future flows. For example, consider a retiring farmer. You might think that they have an incentive to run the soil dry in their last season since they won’t be using it in the future, but this would hurt the sale value of the farm. An elected representative who’s term limit is coming up wouldn’t have the same incentives.
Of course, firms incentives are very misaligned in important ways. The question is: Can we rely on government to improve these incentives.
Maxwell Tabarrok
Karma: 676
Daniel and I continue the comment thread here
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-regulation-is-unsafe?r=awlwu&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=54561569
It’s not a Motte and Bailey because I don’t switch between positions. My definition of the hardline position is to “restrict the FDA’s mandatory authority to labeling and make their efficacy testing completely non-binding.”
I could have made an argument for removing FDA safety testing as well but I didn’t. I am arguing only for the Motte against Scott’s plan to expand supplements and experimental drugs.
That’s awesome to hear! Hope you enjoy
Thank you for reading!
There’s a great chapter in Deustch’s Beginning of Infinity on counterintuitive properties of infinite sets. One of them is relevant to anthropic reasoning type arguments sometimes made by longtermists.
For example, the grabby aliens paper deducing a lot of information based on the fact that human’s appearance seems astoundingly early relative to the lifetime of the universe. Or the Doomsday argument which says we should expect the world to end soon as that’s the only outcome which would make our presence average rather than being an outlier right at the beginning of human history.However, as Deustch points out that if you pick any number in an infinite set, it will be astoundingly close to the beginning. More precisely, notions of ‘average’ or ‘common’ are not well defined in infinite sets. There are just as many odd integers as odd + even integers. There are just as many integers divisible by a trillion as there are integers. So if the universe is confirmed to be truly infinite then these anthropic reasoning arguments will have to change.
That’s not a part of any of the plans to cancel student debt that have been implemented or are being considered. That would definitely change a lot of the arguments but I don’t think it would make debt cancellation look like a much better policy, though the reasons it was bad would be different.