Your final conclusion here appears to be—Do not expect your new pleasures to replace the old.
Yes. And thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it.
One of my goals was to also apply “Do not expect your new pleasures to replace the old” to other types of decision making. It was a critique of using net-benefit analysis on non-fungible costs. The benefits of a policy don’t replace its harms and costs. Tradeoffs are not the same thing as substitution.
Every tradeoff between non-fungibles incurs a debt, and net-benefit hides that behind a single positive number. It’s an uneccessary step—one can still make tradeoffs, while keeping a ledger of this debt.
This influences real-life outcomes in things like City Planning (where housing people quickly, without underlying infrastructure results in permanent slums) or Politics (where those on the wrong end of the net-gain in jobs are ignored).
These phenomenon wouldn’t come as a big surprise if one had recognized the debt incurred every time we made these tradeoffs.
Yes. And thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it.
One of my goals was to also apply “Do not expect your new pleasures to replace the old” to other types of decision making. It was a critique of using net-benefit analysis on non-fungible costs. The benefits of a policy don’t replace its harms and costs. Tradeoffs are not the same thing as substitution.
Every tradeoff between non-fungibles incurs a debt, and net-benefit hides that behind a single positive number. It’s an uneccessary step—one can still make tradeoffs, while keeping a ledger of this debt.
This influences real-life outcomes in things like City Planning (where housing people quickly, without underlying infrastructure results in permanent slums) or Politics (where those on the wrong end of the net-gain in jobs are ignored).
These phenomenon wouldn’t come as a big surprise if one had recognized the debt incurred every time we made these tradeoffs.