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Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

Will people pay more for stability and reliability? If so, then that is what businesses will optimize for.

Businesses exist to give us what we want. Those that do it well are profitable, those that don’t aren’t.

Keep in mind that the effort spent to make healthcare more stable could have instead been used to provide more healthcare overall. Or something else entirely, like shoes or haircuts.

All services are not as good as they could be, because the effort beyond “good enough” gets shifted to some other more valuable purpose, where things are not good enough yet.

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> Will people pay more for stability and reliability?

Given that the USA pays higher-than-average prices for poorer-than-average outcomes, I'd say this is a spurious hypothetical, mostly useful for helping to demarcate the point where economics ceases to be an empirical, scientific pursuit and instead becomes a sort of low-rigor offshoot of moral philosophy.

But, back in the realm of epiricism, we know that this is one of those situations where closer government regulation can produce higher quality of service at lower cost, because the rest of the developed world has figured out multiple successful formulae for doing so. The only clear downside, if you can call it that, is that their hospital administrators don't seem to have quite such large collections of luxury watches.

I think you are implying that most people are 'happy enough' with the current businesses they interact with.

Most people realize that a business will only change if a significant portion of buyers change their spending habits, and individually choosing to not support a business out of ethical concerns only hurts themselves.

Then there ends up being a lot of people who buy products from businesses they hate, and would support collective action against those businesses, like passing laws.

People like that aren't dumb, they are just trying to work around how their next best option is so much worse than buying the original product.

“All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

People are selfish, a dash of prisoner's dilemma, a pinch of tragedy of the commons, and you get businesses that serve individuals while failing society. Also efficiency is the enemy of robustness. No one wants to pay 10% more for slightly inferior hard drives, until a flood destroys the entire worlds production capacity. I consider myself a libertarianish sort of thinker, but market forces are a greedy algorithm, with all the downsides of that.

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