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Comment by ngruhn | Hacker News Reader

I know it's kinda beside the point but I like incentives compared to hard rules as a policy measure. They are much more effective, less bureaucratic and easier to push through. They are like weights vs. booleans.

Don't like smoking? Try out right banning it. It's impossible. You have to fight the lobbyist, the addicted consumers, the workers employed by the industry, ... Slapping a tax on it is much easier. A soft NO that's giving everyone time to adjust.

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The problem with "absolute" taxes (A fixed % of the price for everyone) is that they punish the poor but don't affect the rich, while most of the problems out there are caused by the rich, because they are more powerful. You don't care about a carbon tax on your extremely polluting plane tickets if this represents 0,01% of your revenue. One solution is to make the tax proportional to your revenue, like in Switzerland speed tickets are which means someone already got 1.7M fine from one over-speed limit driving. But then people will manage to lie about their revenue, as rich always do. Then you could say that it's linked to the person, not the money, so in France if you drive too fast your driving licence is suspended. But once again, that would completely destroy a poor person life, not being able to go to his job anymore, while a rich will be a bit annoyed but just pay a cab. It would be so much better if people were doing the right thing because they knew it is the right thing, instead of having to add incentive to push them to do so. Our planet is burning right now, that would be a good moment to act.

On the other hand, there are vastly fewer rich people than poor, so for many things it doesn't matter if they can pay the fine. If only millionaires were littering, the streets would be quite clean.

That's all nice on a theoretical but such ideas quickly fall flat in a world where corporations are owned by rich people and create pollution often whole countries are even unable to pull off, often completely unpunished often economically and politically ("we need more jobs") encouraged.

I think reducing individuals to two people whose only difference is wealth in respect to which goods they can buy is wrong when applied to real world societies in the same way that weather prognosis based on a very limited set of parameters is wrong.

Wealth is not a measure to pay just fines or good, but today effectively the approximation for power that individuals, groups of individuals or legal entities hold. And measuring wealth is a huge complex topic on its own which also makes the taxation topic very complicated.

I think that's a huge flaw in present day economical thought. X is good because it increases X/Y ignoring secondary effects. It's like predicting whether it will rain on a given day by just looking at which way the wind goes on your weather station. There is theoretical truth to it, but given both secondary effects and the rest of the world that you might completely ignore but might have complete or partial reversal effects.

And then you have various groups that anyway mess with the details of the rules and people that ignore them through various other means, like not getting caught.

Classic example is also "We raise taxes, because then the rich will go away" which ignores things from "the rich" potentially not giving you anything if they don't give you taxes and the fact that your country might be able to offer a bit more both as a living and a working place than the level of taxes. In fact there have been studies conducted and the reality is that it barely has an effect. Turns out that people don't just leave for paying something that might even indirectly benefit them. Just like if you are rich you probably don't care much if the price for base goods increases, because you might have way bigger incentives like being in a secure place, having a house and family at a place and your company currently running smoothly with no downtrend in sight.

You're assuming Homo Economicus - that people evaluate the risk/reward before littering.

Another example: In Germany the chancellor decided that workers take too much "sick leave". Fair enough (probably) but they decided to clamp down on it by requiring a doctor's certificate from day one. Rookie mistake! For the doctors it piles on extra bureaucracy. Everyone who's actually sick is either miserable waiting in a doctor's office just to get some paperwork done or picks the lesser evil and goes to work sick where they infect the remaining colleagues.

An incentive based solution is: reduced pay on sick days. With _no pay_ you get sick people at work. With _full pay_ you get healthy people at home. With _reduced pay_ you can find a sweet spot. That adds no bureaucracy for doctors. For employers there is some but it directly translates into cost savings.

If I've got told, "oh btw, when you are sick you only get 70% of your wage" my risk management system would go full alarm mode. That's a risk I wouldn't want to take on me.

However whatever Germany is doing right now definitely isn't the way to to either.

Well, what do you expect from electing politicians who trust nobody and believe everyone's lying for money?

I've heard that doctors now issue at least 5-day sick notes even for the most minor thing, so his policy for forcing people to go to work has backfired.

Sounds great mate, come to Australia! [0]

[0] https://theconversation.com/three-things-australia-must-do-t...

Fair enough but cutting the tax is another incentive measure: make the legal way to buy cigarettes the cheapest way. As the article states: the fact illicit tobacco is illegal does not prevent it and poses massive enforcement costs.

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