The point of your post was that analysis based on ignorance missed people who just didn’t get that they might be tricked. Now you are saying they do realize they might be tricked, which is why they support the policy. So we are back to ignorance.
People can realize in the abstract that they’re probably being tricked by credit card companies without possessing the legal expertise (or the time!) to go through all the fine print and work out which companies are tricking them most or least. Mandating disclosure doesn’t necessarily change this.
People can also underestimate the magnitude of the tricking, and still want to outlaw it.
They may even believe that mostly other people are being tricked (blind spot bias) and hence “altruistically” support a policy that would actually protect them just as much as anyone else.
And finally, the financially sophisticated may suffer from living in a world of financial products designed to be sold to the financially naive (being too small a market segment, or too hard to market to, or too local or too integrated a market, for specialized products for them to prove effective), and so the intelligentsia/nobility that produces all the visible talk on this subject, wants to outlaw financial trickery from being aware that they are probably being tricked, on behalf of the majority that are not aware they are being tricked (note this is not invalid as justification!)
But ignorance in rational agent models of asymmetric information don’t cause people to be tricked, so it’s can’t be ignorance of that sort.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that people understand that the deck is stacked against them, while at the same time not knowing exactly how to protect themselves and so falling for some of the tricks, and would be perfectly happy to have a government they trusted simply remove the bad stuff from the menu. I know that’s how I see it.
Ooo—sign me up for that! A government I trust that will remove the bad stuff from the menu, and… ohh, hang on. What will the credit card companies, who are a concentrated, highly incentivesed interest group, do next? How will they act on our democratically elected representatives? When we present our carefully thought out policy recommendations to parliament, and the parliament passes the details through to committee… what will happen next? What’s likely to come out the other end of the legislative sausage machine?
When we then try to organize the millions of self-identified likely victims of complexity, and the hundreds of thousands of wise altruists who want to help the likely victims, for all of whom this is a fairly unimportant matter… when we array them against the lobbiests… who’s likely to stay the course and win the regulation that’ll help their tribe?
David, that situation is well modeled as ignorance. So either there are models of ignorance supporting your case, or you need to describe a different situation.
The point of your post was that analysis based on ignorance missed people who just didn’t get that they might be tricked. Now you are saying they do realize they might be tricked, which is why they support the policy. So we are back to ignorance.
People can realize in the abstract that they’re probably being tricked by credit card companies without possessing the legal expertise (or the time!) to go through all the fine print and work out which companies are tricking them most or least. Mandating disclosure doesn’t necessarily change this.
People can also underestimate the magnitude of the tricking, and still want to outlaw it.
They may even believe that mostly other people are being tricked (blind spot bias) and hence “altruistically” support a policy that would actually protect them just as much as anyone else.
And finally, the financially sophisticated may suffer from living in a world of financial products designed to be sold to the financially naive (being too small a market segment, or too hard to market to, or too local or too integrated a market, for specialized products for them to prove effective), and so the intelligentsia/nobility that produces all the visible talk on this subject, wants to outlaw financial trickery from being aware that they are probably being tricked, on behalf of the majority that are not aware they are being tricked (note this is not invalid as justification!)
Not knowing “which companies are tricking them most” is ignorance, and standard models of ignorance can apply.
But ignorance in rational agent models of asymmetric information don’t cause people to be tricked, so it’s can’t be ignorance of that sort.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that people understand that the deck is stacked against them, while at the same time not knowing exactly how to protect themselves and so falling for some of the tricks, and would be perfectly happy to have a government they trusted simply remove the bad stuff from the menu. I know that’s how I see it.
Ooo—sign me up for that! A government I trust that will remove the bad stuff from the menu, and… ohh, hang on. What will the credit card companies, who are a concentrated, highly incentivesed interest group, do next? How will they act on our democratically elected representatives? When we present our carefully thought out policy recommendations to parliament, and the parliament passes the details through to committee… what will happen next? What’s likely to come out the other end of the legislative sausage machine?
When we then try to organize the millions of self-identified likely victims of complexity, and the hundreds of thousands of wise altruists who want to help the likely victims, for all of whom this is a fairly unimportant matter… when we array them against the lobbiests… who’s likely to stay the course and win the regulation that’ll help their tribe?
David, that situation is well modeled as ignorance. So either there are models of ignorance supporting your case, or you need to describe a different situation.
I think clarifying this disagreement is worth a seperate post, which I’ll write up in the next few days.