Costs and Rewards Matter
Costs and rewards matter.
Page 62, Learning from the Past, The Sovereign Individual.
A simple statement with a profound meaning: lower the costs to do ‘something’ and the incidents of ‘something’ will increase. Raise the rewards and see an increase in the incidence of ‘something’.
- Make it cheaper and easier to access & consume fast foods; a boom in lifestyle diseases.
- Increase the opportunity to commit crime with reduced detection, through diversion of policing assets from community policing; crime will increase.
- Make the profit from speculative property investing, almost tax free and not subject to capital gains tax; it’s ‘House for Tulips’ and a high-property turnover with insufficient new builds.
- Make access to an emergent technology such as ChatGPT or LangChain as simple as signing into a web page or cloning a GitHub repository; an AI ‘gold rush’.
It is alarming that as a species we are still driven or some might say led, to do certain behaviours by pricing or access strategies. I thought that we were moving past this almost hedonistic, primal rush towards cooperative performance. Maybe we are but it is too slow, too fragmented and cannot compete for clicks or eyeballs with the sensationalist doom & gloom masquerading as news.
In my view, the single biggest issue we have, is that we are still designing and shaping our global economy for profit, not performance or progress. Until progress becomes the single, most important factor than underpins all that we do, bad stuff will continue to happen.
There is nothing wrong with Profit, but it should be a consequence of doing great things that value-add to our society, not taking from it valuable resources that could be used for all.
Maybe AI can help us move past that, by discovering novel solutions that we just cannot see with our little moneky brain, or our ‘Me me me’ attitudes.
Time will tell.
Change the costs and rewards, change the behaviours.
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