Mechanism design is, to a large extent, a conflict theory
I would say that mechanism design is how mistake theorists respond to situations where conflict theory is relevant—i.e., where there really is a “bad guy”. Mechanism design is not about “what consequences should happen to different agents”, it’s about designing a system to achieve a goal using unaligned agents—“consequences” are just one tool in the tool box, and mechanism design (and mistake theory) is perfectly happy to use other tools as well.
the main thesis is that power allows people to avoid committing direct crime while having less-powerful people commit those crimes instead … This is a denotative statement that can be evaluated independent of “who should we be angry at”.
There’s certainly a denotative idea in the OP which could potentially be useful. On the other hand, saying “the post has a few sentences about moral blame” seems like a serious understatement of the extent to which the OP is about who to be angry at.
in some cases “who we should be angry at” if that’s the best available implementation
The OP didn’t talk about any other possible implementations, which is part of why it smells like conflict theory. Framing it through principal-agent problems would at least have immediately suggested others.
I would say that mechanism design is how mistake theorists respond to situations where conflict theory is relevant—i.e., where there really is a “bad guy”. Mechanism design is not about “what consequences should happen to different agents”, it’s about designing a system to achieve a goal using unaligned agents—“consequences” are just one tool in the tool box, and mechanism design (and mistake theory) is perfectly happy to use other tools as well.
There’s certainly a denotative idea in the OP which could potentially be useful. On the other hand, saying “the post has a few sentences about moral blame” seems like a serious understatement of the extent to which the OP is about who to be angry at.
The OP didn’t talk about any other possible implementations, which is part of why it smells like conflict theory. Framing it through principal-agent problems would at least have immediately suggested others.