Potentially of interest on this topic, there are already various implementations of systems with a similar theme in different regions and venues for gambling activities. Their successes, failures, and challenges may provide some evidence regarding how wider systems may fare.
I find things as "Gambling Self-Exclusion Schemes" of multiple countries, thanks for the hint, indeed a good example, corroborating that at least in some of the most egregious examples of addictive goods unleashed on the population some action in in the suggested direction is technically & politically feasible - how successful tbc; looking fwd to looking into it in more detail!
Markets let us buy anything society can produce, anytime.[1] At first glance, that sounds great.
While that might be true for physical goods, it's not for other goods like friendship that people care about.
Indeed. I though it to be relatively clear with "buy" I meant to mostly focus on things we typically explicitly buy with money (for brevity even for these I simplified a lot, omitting that shops are often not allowed to open 24/7, some things like alcohol aren't sold to people of all ages, in some countries not sold in every type of shop, and/or or not at all times).
Although I don't want to say that exploring how to port the core thought to broader categories of exchanges/relationships couldn't bring interesting extra insights.
This is a good topic for exploration, though I don't have much belief that there's any feasible implementation "at a societal level". There are plenty of options at individual levels, mostly informal - commitments to friends and family, writing down plans and reviewing them later, etc.
In terms of theory, I don't think we have a good model of individual identity that includes sub-agency and inconsistency over time. It's not clear at all why we would, in principle, enforce the wishes of one part of someone onto another part.
This is a good topic for exploration, though I don't have much belief that there's any feasible implementation "at a societal level".
Fair. I have instead the impression I see plenty of avenues. Bit embarrassingly: they are so far indeed not sufficiently structured in my head, require more detailed tinkering out, exploring failure modes and avenues for addressing in detail, plus they might, require significant restructuring of the relevant markets, and, worst, I have insufficient time to explore them in much detail quite now). But yes, it would remain to be shown & tested-out as mentioned in the post, and I hope I once can explore/write about it a bit more. For now my ambition is: Look, that is indeed a serious topic to explore; we should at least be aware of the possibility to upgrade people's liberty by providing them 'only' alienable instead of inalienable rights to buy or consume. And start looking around as to what we might be able to do..
There are plenty of options at individual levels, mostly informal - commitments to friends and family, writing down plans and reviewing them later, etc.
An indicator of how good we are by using the "options at individual level" is how society looks; as explained, it doesn't look good (though, as caveat-ed in the post, admittedly I cannot say how much of what seems to be addressable by commitment is indeed solely commitment failure; though there is imho plenty of indirect and anecdotal evidence suggesting it contributes a sizeable junk of it).
It's not clear at all why we would, in principle, enforce the wishes of one part of someone onto another part.
"in principle" right, in practice I think it's relatively simple. Nothing is really simple, but:
That voluntary savings scheme incentivizes the saving-until-retirement by removing earnings & wealth taxes. It is on top of the compulsory schemes that are meant to cover basic living costs while at age (this has become a bit harder today but used to be, I think, simpler in the past when the voluntary policy also existed already).
We have overly simplistic principles of market organization that don't square with human reality, giving too much freedom to indulge our short-term impulses, and not enough tools to help our disciplined, long-term selves say no to it. Suffering from over-consumption in ways our long-term self could unlikely agree with is too much of a norm to be considered the acceptable exception to the rule. So we require a rethinking of "markets" and "freedom" for a shift on a societal level - rather than lay the burden on individuals' willpower alone. The right to buy should become alienable: We require societal structures & laws that support our long-term self to restrict the future short-term self. I must be able to impose today that tomorrow I'll be unable to get a chocolate.
Status of post: Exploration with many questions remaining open (technical, psychological, economical, legal) but a core direction I'm convinced should be explored in more detail.
Markets let us buy anything society can produce, anytime.[1] At first glance, that sounds great.
The crux? Society fails to empower us to undo this if ever we want to. It doesn't enable the individual to prevent herself from consuming anything anytime in any quantity.
Seeing the consequences, e.g. >40% of adults obese in the US, some 14% diabetic, the conclusion seems clear: The unconstrained consumption possibilities are highly destructive.[2] Very, very difficult to justify to let happen if there are any means to help limit the problem. The issue is by far not niche. We systematically don't resist to things we want ourselves to resist to, and in terms of life quality it risks to negate a significant junk of the gains we have from the economic progress we've made in recent centuries.
We're not a coherent self. We're - a bit stylized - a short-term & long-term self.
Short-termie is the cannot-resist-to-temptation self that becomes the fat sick American if let loose, or the needlessly-alcoholic, or the gambling addict, the smoker struggling to quit, the TV- or Youtube-Junkie, or the hourly-procrastination-newsmedia-scroller like I am (the latter arguably being a bit less sad and/or easier to prevent if dearly wanted).
Long-term self is the one who genuinely cares about the future well-being, is better at resisting temptations, and is generally the self we want in control.
My cash, my bank card, my supermarkets, my energy-wasting hot shower, essentially the entire society: Right now, none cares about supporting my long-term self in her fight against short-termie.
Why not? Because we designed society as if individuals were coherent selves knowing what they want, what's best for "them". Even though we of course all know, all too often we have our short-termies in charge when facing the ubiquitous consumption temptations.
On a meta-level, the solution seems obvious: give the long-term self officially the power to restrict the short-term self when it’s about to make its poor choices. In contrast to some life-hack type solutions, we should understand there is zero reason to think this shall be the burden of the individual alone. We should seek legal & practical societal level solutions to enable the long-term self to reign in short-termie. Once we fully acknowledge there is a difference between a short- and a long-term self living in all of us, there is no simple justification for consumption as an inalienable right. In principle, everyone would ideally be empowered to restrict many (any?) of her future short-term consumption decisions, and society should aim in that direction with whichever means seem pragmatically helpful towards it.
In actual implementation it can be simple and hard at the same time. In fact, from the outset it might even look daunting to implement anything practical here. But, arguably, that's just because of the hitherto near-complete lack of thinking (afaik) in that direction; the required evolution of solutions through trial and error until we find things that work hasn't taken place yet.
We should always have respected the long-term self - that is, her difference with short-termie - searching for ways we can empower her. The person's long-term self should be allowed to black-list the person from shops or individual shelves therein. Bank accounts should offer some types of self-programmable purchase-blockers. The fridge should have a programmable lock (ok, obviously exists), food cupboards too. Yes, sounds trivial to circumvent, but we could even have a system where anyone who provides us with the wrong stuff the wrong time can be legally pursued, i.e. we'd endow us with, somewhat confusingly, an inalienable right to alienability of the right to consume. If really needed, we could even think of going into a direction of generally putting the onus on the seller each time she sells us anything: "Can you provide evidence the now ill customer really had her long-term self in charge when she bought that chocolate from you? Did he proof his long-term commitment to wanting the chocolate, as opposed to having had merely his short-termie come buy the good in your shop?"
If you say that all won't work: Yes, nothing I could propose might work or make sense out of the box. Evolution. We must dare think of the problem this type of system can solve, then we'll gradually find solutions, with trial-and-error as in all domains. Will it ever become easy, work really well; will it really solve a lot of major willpower issues? Dunno.
At first glance, this might sound like a libertarian nightmare: “Restrictions on possibly all goods?!”
But it’s really the opposite. This system is more libertarian than what we currently have because it adds another dimension of choice: the choice to restrict yourself in advance. It’s a “choose to not be able to choose” option.
In fact, under such a system, we might even be able to legalize more goods and services, because your long-term self could opt out of them, restricting the short-term self from making impulsive decisions.
The problem warrants societal level solutions - individually we're lacking the ability to restrict ourselves easily enough - and I think it's important we're exploring seriously how we can best tackle it on the right level.
There's though now hope we can improve ourselves even on an individual level if we implement the right AI assistants. If we can integrate them into our bank accounts, have them observe and restrict - with enough authority - our shopping or our picking-stuff-from-the-fridge in the way we tell it before, quite something might already be gained. But if we continue to think about the issue the way we've so far done, might we even miss that potentially simple emerging solution?
I’m ignoring e.g. illegal drugs or anything unaffordable, because those are separate discussions.
Of course, prevalence of obesity and diabetes might not go to zero just because we support people systematically to sticking to long-term plans, but judging from many anecdotes and a lot we read about people trying diets and the difficulties in sticking to them, and about what people would be willing to give to reduce their food or other addictions, it seems a reasonable prior that a significant part of addictive behavior could be constrained if we'd systematically enable the long-term self to put hard constraints on what the future short-term self can do.