The Grabby Hand - Desires

This surely isn't new, but in conversations I've been having I've found a couple of things to often be overlooked. Writing them down helps me make the points more clearly by thinking it through more extensively now and "caching" the results, and by being able to point to these directly.

The obviously great thing about markets is that they allocate (and convert) resources efficiently and ~automatically, despite everyone having different preferences and desires. This is really good, but...

--- # Desires not all desires and preferences are "good"[^1]. On the one hand, some desires and preferences have negative effects so large as that they should ever get satisfied[^2]. E.g. because they are too destructive for the person having this desire (e.g. nitazenes which are highly potent, highly addictive, and very dangerous), or too damaging for society or other individuals (e.g. acting on paedophilia)

On the other hand, not all desires that are OK to fulfil at some quantity are OK to be fulfilled until full satiation. E.g. because they become too destructive for the person having this desire (e.g. to some individuals drugs, gambling, and other supernormal stimuli¹), or too damaging for society (e.g. increased crime to finance addictions and the reduction in societal trust; excessive and predatory power-seeking behavior) or other individuals (secondary effects of e.g. alcoholism (domestic violence, drunk driving, and children born with fetal alcohol syndrome)).

Yet, market forces want to fulfil these nevertheless, perhaps even more so than otherwise and with that burden society.

Ofc everything is a trade-off and it matters on a case-by-case basis how much a given market-provision has negative effects, specifically in

• Scale: how many ppl are affected,
• Severity: how strongly they are affected (or rather the distribution of effect-level), and
• Kind: how they are affected,
• how homo- or heterogenous this effect is across different populations,
• how internalized vs externalized the effect is (i.e. how much of the cost is borne by oneself vs uninvolved parties).

The cut-off level beyond which market-provisions should get regulated (and in what way / to what degree) then depends on how much disutility and utility, short-term vs long-term consequences², and individual vs societal/collective consequences² are weighted against each other, i.e. cultural and ethical questions.

With GLP-I receptor agonist medications seemingly being a bad-desires panacea, it makes it seem more realistic that in the future bad-desires can become a choice and are just curable. Again, the question then becomes at what level of externality what level of intervention is warranted.

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The Grabby Hand - Power & Traps
The Grabby Hand - Marketing

Footnotes

1. see wikipedia and Stuart McMillan’s comic on it ↩

2. both positive and negative ↩ ↩²