market for long term social externalities

#idea #thought #economy #society
parents:: social externalities

• We want companies to think long term and be incentivized to contribute to a healthy society.
• However, currently, these social media companies, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube... seem to be driven by the instant profit monkey: clicks now means money now means happy.
• This can be analogized perhaps with other instances of market solutions to externalities
  • Can we learn something from climate change/climate economics?
    • A big difference is that with climate change, we have a much better understanding of steps that need to be taken: primarily, to reduce carbon production.
    • Therefore, any number of solutions is feasible: taxes on carbon, direct caps on carbon, carbon credits
    • And also a more organic solution: the fact that everyday people are aware that carbon is an issue, and can directly vote with their money.
    • However, for social externalities, it's much less clear what the right solutions are. This poses an issue for
      • regulation: what standards should we set?
      • organic/social solutions: two issues here. One is that we don't know what to change/don't have options. And the other is that we just don't have much power here.
• However, perhaps an organic solution is possible: these companies all, at least at the moment, depend on the stability of society for their own survival. Therefore, they are incentivized to try and engineer their platforms to promote beneficial long term effects.
  • It's like babies vs adults. These companies in they're baby phase need to just eat and eat to get big enough that they're able to (and have to for the sake of their waistline) start thinking longer term. Longer term here means recognizing that the short term benefits of purely attention based algorithms are outweighed by the need for longer term societal stability.
  • more in emergence of top down constraints and incentives on large platforms