The time horizon is long here… most people aren’t sufficiently good at delayed gratification to plan on a 20 year timescale, and that’s how long it takes for children to grow up. And then it takes another 20 years or so for them to be a large fraction of the adult population. That’s half a lifetime.
True, except the people under discussion are not like that. You don’t get to be a millionaire by having small time horizons.
This plan has social desirability bias working against it. Joe Bureaucrat goes up to his colleague and says “Hey Liz, the citizenry will be far easier to subjugate 20 years down the line if we write submissiveness in to this new law.” Mr. Burns steeples his fingertips and chuckles: “My portfolio companies will find themselves profiting nicely once everyone is a submissive little consumer who buys everything they see on TV.” The perpetrators will need to coordinate with scientists in order to draft their legislation, and they’ll need a plausible rationalization for why they’re mandating submissiveness (rather than, say, other crime reduction options like altruism) in order to coordinate on the effort effectively.
Yes and Epictetus and Lumifer have explained who they will go about rationalizing this upthread (several times). If you want a civil discussion you could start by actually paying attention to what the people you’re talking to are saying.
In principle, any law passed regarding this would also affect the children of rich people and bureaucrats. So they’d either have to deal with the fact that their kids would also be submissive or find some way around the law, probably by traveling.
Or simply make the law sufficiently convoluted that it’s possible to get out of it by jumping through bureaucratic hoops.
Yes and Epictetus and Lumifer have explained who they will go about rationalizing this upthread
That’s why I added the point about altruism being an alternative to submissiveness. But I agree that their point is basically a good one.
(In general you might read all my comments in this thread as just bringing up considerations that might be relevant so they can get discussed. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions about this subject and don’t intend to any time soon. Sometimes I don’t bother writing my current belief state because I’m still updating and that would make my comments longer and less content-dense.)
True, except the people under discussion are not like that. You don’t get to be a millionaire by having small time horizons.
Yes and Epictetus and Lumifer have explained who they will go about rationalizing this upthread (several times). If you want a civil discussion you could start by actually paying attention to what the people you’re talking to are saying.
Or simply make the law sufficiently convoluted that it’s possible to get out of it by jumping through bureaucratic hoops.
That’s why I added the point about altruism being an alternative to submissiveness. But I agree that their point is basically a good one.
(In general you might read all my comments in this thread as just bringing up considerations that might be relevant so they can get discussed. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions about this subject and don’t intend to any time soon. Sometimes I don’t bother writing my current belief state because I’m still updating and that would make my comments longer and less content-dense.)