The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
We talk about capitalism being really good at serving revealed preferences, but the thing becomes a bit more twisty when you start talking about capitalism and mass media's ability to shape those preferences. From Bernays to Chomsky we have reams of literature about how mass media is used to tell people what they want, then capitalism supplies it to them, then mass media tells them how free and blessed they are to receive just what they want.
Definitely hard agree on the split between slow, deliberative, rationally-focused thinking and quick, subconscious, emotional, pattern-seeking thinking and the way that most people to their own detriment don't ever examine which of those two they're doing. Hell, I still pretty regularly have trouble differentiating between thinking and reacting and I'm the kind of nerd who spends a lot of time thinking about how I think.
Ultimately capitalism "works", but only if externalities are incorporated into the price.
Hence vice taxes on liquor, cigarettes, the short-lived Bloomberg tax on soda. See also - carbon pricing.
What would that look like for social media, I don't know. If we're truly brainstorming, what if Facebook were forced to charge you cash money for usage beyond a half hour per day? Or past a certain amount of posting?
I'm well aware that politically this would die even faster than the soda tax... selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
> selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
Policy needs a villain. After all, if everyone were on the same page acting in good faith, you wouldn't need policy. The people could just start living the life they want to see.
Alcohol points to drunks, cigarettes points to those backlogging hospitals, carbon pricing points to "evil" oil companies trying to destroy the environment. Soda has tried pointing to the obese also backlogging hospitals, but, as you point out, not very successfully.
Your sweet grandmother uses social media and it makes her happy being able to see photos of her grandchildren. It is hard for the average person to find a villain in that.
This is an interesting take, and dovetails with something I have long felt: that the Soviet Union pushed to the US to be better, without that competition we've lost something.
I was about to respond to the sibling comment: I think one of the missing ingredients is "shame" (in my example: shame of being bettered by the Soviets). After all, we managed to convince people to spend quite a sum going to the moon...
The main problem the vast majority of policy proposals for this sort of problem face is that the proposals almost invariably slip in the idea of some sort of human being, if not an entire population of humans, that is abstractly above the problem and can be trusted to administer the policy. But if that was the case, we often wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
It's really hard to policy-fix something that literally 99% of the population is doing. Who is going to propose it? Who is going to enforce it? Who is going to pay attention to it?
And to be clear, this is commiseration with you, not argument. I have no solution even in principle.
I agree with you. I feel like it becomes the nebulous question of, "how do you change a culture?"
Honestly I think part of that historically came from "shame", but that's certainly out of fashion these days, plus people can just go to their social media bubble to escape it.
I'm starting to think religion was a useful ingredient too: "because God said so" has its uses. "God doesn't want you to mix fabrics, eat pork, or use social media"
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
[1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...