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Paternalism Is About Status

By Robin Hanson · August 11, 2019 10:50 pm · Comments (0)

… children, whom he finds delightful and remarkably self-sufficient from the age of 4. He chalks this up to the fact that they are constantly lied to, can go anywhere and in their first years of life are given pretty much anything they please. If the baby wants the butcher knife, the baby gets the butcher knife. This novel approach may not sound like appropriate parenting, but Kulick observes that the children acquire their self-sufficiency by learning to seek out their own answers and by carefully navigating their surroundings at an early age. … the only villagers whom he’s ever seen beat their children are the ones who left to attend Catholic school. (more)

Bofi forager parenting is quite permissive and indulgent by Western standards. Children spend more time in close physical contact with parents, and are rarely directed or punished by parents. Children are allowed to play with knives, machete, and campfires without the warnings or interventions of parents; this permissive patently style has been described among other forager groups as well. (more)

Much of the literature on paternalism (including my paper) focuses on justifying it: how much can a person A be helped by allowing a person B to prohibit or require particular actions in particular situations? Such as parents today often try to do with their children. Most of this literature focuses on various deviations from simple rational agent models, but my paper shows that this is not necessary; B can help A even when both are fully rational. All it takes is for B to sometimes know things that A does not.

However, this focus on justification distracts from efforts to explain the actual variation in paternalism that we see around us. Sometimes third parties endorse and support the ability of B to prohibit or require actions by A, and sometimes third parties oppose and discourage such actions. How can we best explain which happens where and when?

First let me set aside situations where A authorizes B to, at some future date, limit or require actions by A. People usually justify this in terms of self-control, i.e., where A today disagrees with future A’s preferences. To me this isn’t real paternalism, which I see as more essentially about the extra info that B may hold.

Okay, let’s start with a quick survey of some of the main observed correlates of paternalism. Continue reading "Paternalism Is About Status" »

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A Model of Paternalism

By Robin Hanson · August 10, 2019 10:30 pm · Comments (1)

Twenty years ago this month I started my job here at GMU. My “job talk paper”, which got me this job, was on a game theory model of paternalism. While the journal that published it insisted that it be framed as a model of drug regulation, it was in fact far more general. (Why would a journal be reluctant to publish a general result? The econ journal status hierarchy dictates that only top journals may publish general results.) Oddly, I’ve never before discussed that paper here (though I discussed related concepts here). So here goes.

Here’s the abstract:

One explanation for drug bans is that regulators know more than consumers do about product quality. But why not just communicate the information in their ban, perhaps via a “would have banned” label? Because product labeling is cheap-talk, any small market failure tempts regulators to lie about quality, inducing consumers who suspect such lies to not believe everything they are told. In fact, when regulators expect market failures to result in under-consumption of a drug, and so would not ban it for informed consumers, regulators ex ante prefer to commit to not banning this drug for uninformed consumers.

Consider someone choosing how much alcohol or caffeine to drink per day on average. The higher is the quality of alcohol or caffeine as a drink, in terms of food, fun, productivity and safety, then the more they should want to drink it. However, they are ignorant about this quality parameter, and so must listen to advice from someone who knows more. Furthermore, this advisor doesn’t exactly share their interests; for the same value of quality, this advisor might want them to drink more or less than they would want to drink. Thus the advisor has a reason to be not entirely honest with their advice, and so the listener has a reason to not believe everything they are told.

When the advisor can only advise, we have a standard “cheap talk signaling game”. In equilibrium, the advisor picks one of a limited number of quality options. For example, they might only say either “bad” or “good”. The person being advised will believe this crude advice, but would not believe more precise advice, due to the incentive to lie. The closer are the interests of these two people, the more distinctions the advisor can make and be believed, and thus the better off both of them are on average.

My innovation was to give the advisor the additional option to, instead of offering advice, ban the person from drinking alcohol or caffeine. The result of a ban is a low (though maybe not zero) level of the activity. When quality happens to be low, the advisor would rather ban than give the lowest possible advice. This is in part because the listener expects the advisor to ban when quality is low. So even when their interests differ by only a little, the advisor bans often, far more often than they would if the listener was perfectly informed about quality.

My model wasn’t about alcohol in particular; it applies to any one-dimensional choice of an activity level, a choice influenced by an uncertain one-dimensional quality level. Thus my model can help us understand why people placed into a role where they can either advise or ban some activity would often ban. Even when both parties are fully rational, and even when their interests only differ by small amounts. The key is that even small differences can induce big lies and an expectation of frequent bans, which force the advisor to ban often because extreme advice will not be believed.

My model allows for relatively general functional forms for the preferences of both parties, and how those depend on quality. It can also handle the case when the advisor has the option to “require” the product, resulting in some high consumption level. (Though I never modeled the case where the advisor has both the option to ban or require the product, in addition to giving advice.) The model can also be easily generalized to varying levels of info for both parties, and to random errors in the choices made by both parties. The essential results don’t change much in those variations.

The main theorem that I prove in my paper is for the case where the advisor’s differing interest makes that advisor prefer a higher activity level for any given quality level. For example, the advisor might be an employer and the listener might be their employee. In this case, for any given quality level, the employer might prefer their employee to drink more caffeine than the employee would choose, in order to be more productive at work. What I prove is that on average both parties are better off in the game where the advisor is not able to ban the activity; this is because the option to ban reduces the activity level on average.

Similarly, when the advisor prefers a lower activity level for any given quality level, both parties are better off when the advisor is not able to require the activity. This could apply to the case where the activity is alcohol, and the advisor is the government. Due to the possibility of auto accidents, the government could prefer less alcohol consumption for any given level of alcohol quality.

This main theorem has direct policy relevance for things like medicines, readings, and investments. If policy makers tend to presume that people on average consume too few medicines, read too little, and invest too little, then they should regret having the ability to ban particular medicines, readings, or investments, as this ability will on average make both sides worse off.

So that’s my model. In my next post, I’ll discuss how much this actually helps us understand where we do and don’t see paternalism in the world.

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Against Irony

By Robin Hanson · August 10, 2019 8:05 am · Comments (0)

Papua New Guinea. There are nearly 850 languages spoken in the country, making it the most linguistically diverse place on earth. … Mountains, jungles and swamps keep villagers isolated, preserving their languages. A rural population helps too: only about 13% of Papuans live in towns. …. Fierce tribal divisions—Papua New Guinea is often shaken by communal violence—also encourages people to be proud of their own languages. The passing of time is another important factor. It takes about a thousand years for a single language to split in two, says William Foley, a linguist. With 40,000 years to evolve, Papuan languages have had plenty of time to change naturally. (more)

British printer who used a mirrored question mark to distinguish rhetorical questions in 1575, and John Wilkins, a British scientist who proposed an inverted exclamation mark to indicate irony in 1668. … The problem with adopting new irony punctuation is that if the people reading you don’t understand it, you’re no better off. … The ironic punctuation mark that the social internet can claim as its own is the sarcasm tilde, as in, “That’s so ~on brand~” … But tildes can feel a bit obvious. For a wryer mood, a drier wit, one might try a more subdued form of ironic punctuation—writing in all lowercase. …

Irony is a linguistic trust fall. When I write or speak with a double meaning, I’m hoping that you’ll be there to catch me by understanding my tone. The risks are high—misdirected irony can gravely injure the conversation—but the rewards are high, too: the sublime joy of feeling purely understood, the comfort of knowing someone’s on your side. No wonder people through the ages kept trying so hard to write it. (more)

Just as the urge to signal loyalty to people nearby has kept New Guinea folks from understanding people over the next mountain, our similar urge pushes us to write in ways that make it hard for those outside our immediate social circles to understand us. Using irony, we sacrifice ease of wide understanding to show loyalty to a closer community. 

Language is like religion, art, and many other customs in this way, helping to bond locals via barriers to wider interaction and understanding. If you think of yourself instead as a world cosmopolitan, preferring to promote world peace and integration via a global culture that avoids hostile isolationist ties to local ethnicities and cultures, then not only should you like world-wide travel, music, literature, emigration, and intermarriage, you should also dislike irony. Irony is the creation of arbitrary language barriers with the sole purpose of preventing wider cultural integration. 

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Advice Wiki

By Robin Hanson · July 31, 2019 1:40 pm · Comments (0)

People often give advice to others; less often, they request advice from others. And much of this advice is remarkably bad. For example, such as the advice to “never settle” in pursuing your career dreams.

When A takes advice from B, that is often seen as raising the status of B and lowering that of A. As a result, people often resist listening to advice, they ask for advice as a way to flatter and submit, and they give advice as a way to assert their status and goodness. For example, advisors often tell others to do what they did, as a way to affirm that they have good morals, and achieved good outcomes via good choices.

These hidden motives understandably detract from the average quality of advice as a guide to action. And the larger is this quality reduction, the more potential there is for creating value via alternative advice institutions. I’ve previously suggested using decision markets for advice in many contexts. In this post, I want to explore a simpler/cheaper approach: a wiki full of advice polls. (This is like something I proposed in 2013.)

Imagine a website where you could browse a space of decision contexts, connected to each other by the subset relation. For example under “picking a career plan after high school”, there’s “picking a college attendance plan” and under that there’s “picking a college” and “picking a major”. For each decision context, people can submit proposed decision advice, such as “go to the highest ranked college you can get into” for “pick a college”. You and anyone could then vote to say which advice they endorse in which contexts, and you see the current voter distribution over advice opinion.

Assume participants can be anonymous if they so choose, but can also be labelled with their credentials. Assume that they can change their votes at anytime, and that the record of each vote notes which options were available at the time. From such voting records, we might see not just the overall distribution of opinion regarding some kind of decision, but also how that distribution varies with quality indicators, such as how much success a person has achieved in related life areas. One might also see how advice varies with level of abstraction in the decision space; is specific advice different from general advice?

Of course such poll results aren’t plausibly as accurate as those resulting from decision markets, at least given the same level of participation. But they should also be much easier to produce, and so might attract far more participation. The worse are our usual sources of advice, the higher the chance that these polls could offer better advice. Compared to asking your friends and family, these distributions of advice less suffer from particular people pushing particular agenda, and anonymous advice may suffer less from efforts to show off. At least it might be worth a try.

Added 1Aug: Note that decision context can include features of the decision maker, and that decision advice can include decision functions, which map features of the decision context to particular decisions.

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End War Or Mosquitoes?

By Robin Hanson · July 29, 2019 8:00 pm · Comments (0)

Malaria may have killed half of all the people that ever lived. (more)

Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90% of malaria cases occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. (more)

378,000 people worldwide died a violent death in war each year between 1985 and 1994. (more)

Over the last day I’ve done two Twitter polls, one of which was my most popular poll ever. Each poll was on whether, if we had the option, we should try to end a big old nemesis of humankind. One was on mosquitoes, the other on war:

In both cases the main con argument is a worry about unintended side effects. Our biological and social systems are both very complex, with each part having substantial and difficult to understand interactions with many other parts. This makes it hard to be sure that an apparently bad thing isn’t actually causing good things, or preventing other bad things.

Poll respondents were about evenly divided on ending mosquitoes, but over 5 to 1 in favor of ending war. Yet mosquitoes kill many more people than do wars, mosquitoes are only a small part of our biosphere with only modest identifiable benefits, and war is a much larger part of key social systems with much easier to identify functions and benefits. For example, war drives innovation, deposes tyrants, and cleans out inefficient institutional cruft that accumulates during peacetime. All these considerations favor ending mosquitoes, relative to ending war.

Why then is there so much more support for ending war, relative to mosquitoes? The proximate cause seems obvious: in our world, good people oppose both war and also ending species. Most people probably aren’t thinking this through, but are instead just reacting to this surface ethical gloss. Okay, but why is murderous nature so much more popular than murderous features of human systems? Perhaps in part because we are much more eager to put moral blame on humans, relative to nature. Arguing to keep war makes you seem like allies of deeply evil humans, while arguing to keep mosquitoes only makes you allies of an indifferent nature, which makes you far less evil by association.

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How To Prep For War

By Robin Hanson · July 26, 2019 11:00 am · Comments (0)

In my last two posts I’ve noted while war deaths have fallen greatly since the world wars, the magnitude and duration of this fall isn’t that far out of line with previous falls over the last four centuries, falls that have always been followed by rises, as part of a regular cycle of war. I also noted that the theory arguments that have been offered to explain why this trend will long continue, in a deviation from the historical pattern, seem weak. Thus there seems to be a substantial and neglected chance of a lot more war in the next century. I’m not the only one who says this; so do many war experts.

If a lot more war is coming, what should you do personally, to help yourself, your family, and your friends? (Assuming your goal is mainly to personally survive and prosper.) While we can’t say that much specifically about future war’s style, timing, or participants, we know enough to suggest some general advice.

1. Over the last century most war deaths have not been battle deaths, and the battle death share has fallen. Thus you should worry less about dying in battle, and more about other ways to die.

2. War tends to cause the most harm near where its battles happen, and near concentrations of supporting industrial and human production. This means you are more at risk if you live near the nations that participate in the war, and in those nations near dense concentrations and travel routes, that is, near major cities and roads.

3. If there are big pandemics or economic collapse, you may be better off in more isolated and economically self-sufficient places. (That doesn’t include outer space, which is quite unlikely to be economically self-sufficient anytime soon.) Of course there is a big tradeoff here, as these are the places we expect to do less well in the absence of war.

4. Most of your expected deaths may happen in scenarios where nukes are used. There’s a big literature on how to prepare for and avoid harms from nukes, so I’ll just refer you to that. Ironically, you may be more at risk from being hurt by nukes in places that have nukes to retaliate with. But you might be more at risk from being enslaved or otherwise dominated if your place doesn’t have nukes.

5. Most of our computer systems have poor security, and so are poorly protected against cyberwar. This is mainly because software firms are usually more eager to be first to market than to add security, which most customers don’t notice at first. If this situation doesn’t change much, then you should be wary of depending too much on standard connected computer systems. For essential services, rely on disconnected, non-standard, or high-security-investment systems.

6. Big wars tend to induce a lot more taxation of the rich, to pay for wars. So have your dynasty invest more in having more children, relative to fewer richer kids, or invest in assets that are hidden from tax authorities. Or less bother to invest for the long run.

7. The biggest wars so far, the world wars and the thirty years war, have been driven by strong ideologies, such as communism and catholicism. So help your descendants avoid succumbing to strong ideologies, while also avoiding the appearance of publicly opposing locally popular versions. And try to stay away from places that seem more likely to succumb.

8. While old ideologies still have plenty of fire, the big new ideology on the block seems related to woke identity. While this seems to inspire sufficiently confident passions for war, it seems far from clear who would fight who and how in a woke war. This scenario seems worth more thought.

Added 27July: 

9. If big governance changes and social destruction are coming, that may create opportunities for the adoption of more radical social reforms. And that can encourage us to work more on developing such reforms today.

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Big War Remains Possible

By Robin Hanson · July 25, 2019 1:41 pm · Comments (1)

The following poll suggests that a majority of my Twitter followers think war will decline; in the next 80 years we won’t see a 15 year period with a war death rate above the median level we’ve see over the last four centuries:

To predict a big deviation from the simple historical trend, one needs some sort of basis in theory. Alas, the theory arguments that I’ve heard re war optimism seem quite inadequate. I thus suspect much wishful thinking here.

For example, some say the world economy today is too interdependent for war. But interdependent economies have long gone to war. Consider the world wars in Europe, or the American civil war. Some say that we don’t risk war because it is very destructive of complex fragile physical capital and infrastructure. But while such capital was indeed destroyed during the world wars, the places most hurt rebounded quickly, as they had good institutional and human capital.

Some note that international alliances make war less likely between alliance partners. But they make war more likely between alliances. Some suggest that better info tells us more about rivals today, and so we are less likely to misjudge rival abilities and motives. But there still seems plenty of room for errors here as “brinkmanship” is a key dynamic. Also, this doesn’t prevent powers from investing in war abilities to gain advantages via credible threats of war.

Some point to a reduced willingness by winners to gain concrete advantages via the ancient strategies of raping and enslaving losers, and demanding great tribute. But we still manage to find many other motives for war, and there’s no fundamental obstacles to reviving ancient strategies; tribute is still quite feasible, as is slavery. Also, the peak war periods so far have been associated with ideology battles, and we still have plenty of those.

Some say nuclear weapons have made small wars harder. But that is only between pairs of nations both of which have nukes, which isn’t most nation pairs. Pairs of nations with nukes can still fight big wars, there are more such pairs today than before, over 80 years there’s plenty of time for some pair to pick a fight, and nuke wars casualties may be enormous.

I suspect that many are relying on modern propaganda on our moral superiority over our ancestors. But while we mostly count humans of the mid twentieth century as morally superior to humans from prior centuries, that was the period of peak war mortality.

I also suspect that many are drawing conclusions about war from long term trends regarding other forms of violence, as in slavery, crime, and personal relations, as well as from apparently lower public tolerance for war deaths and overall apparent disapproval and reluctance regarding war. But just before World War I we had also seen such trends:

Then, as now, Europe had lived through a long period of relative peace, … rapid progress … had given humanity a sense of shared interests that precluded war, … world leaders scarcely believed a global conflagration was possible. (more)

The world is vast, eighty years is a long time, and the number of possible global social & diplomatic scenarios over such period is vast. So it seems crazy to base predictions on future war rates on inside view calculations from particular current stances, deals, or inclinations. The raw historical record, and its large long-term fluctuations, should weigh heavily on our minds.

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Will War Return?

By Robin Hanson · July 23, 2019 3:00 pm · Comments (3)

Usually, I don’t get worked up about local short term trends; I try to focus on global long term trends, which mostly look pretty good (at least until the next great era comes). But lately I’ve seen some worrying changes to big trends. For example, while for over a century IQ has risen and death rates have fallen, both steadily, in the last two decades IQ has stopped rising (as has height) in most rich nations, and in the U.S. death rates have started rising. Economic growth also seems to have slowed, thought not stopped, world-wide.

Added to these are some worrisome long term trends. Global warming continues. Fertility has been falling for centuries. Rates of innovation per innovator have been falling greatly for perhaps a century. And since the end of the world wars, within-nation inequality and political polarization has been increasing.

One good-looking trend that hasn’t reversed lately is a falling rate of violence, via crime, civil war, and war between nations. But this graph of war deaths over the last 600 years makes me pause:

Yes, war death rates have fallen since the world wars, but those wars were a historical peak. And though the pattern is noisy, we seem to see a roughly half century cycle (as noted by Turchin), a cycle that is perhaps increasing in magnitude. So we have to wonder: are we now near a war cycle nadir, with another war peak coming soon?

The stakes here are hard to exaggerate. If war is coming back soon, the next peak might be high, maybe even a record high. And the easiest way to imagine achieving that is via nukes. If war may come back soon with a vengeance, we must consider preparing for that possibility.

Not only have we seen fewer war deaths since the world wars, we’ve also seen a great reduction in social support for military virtues, values, and investments. Compared to our ancestors, we glorify soldiers less, and less steel non-soldiers to sacrifice for war. (E.g., see They Shall Not Grow Old.) In contrast, ancient societies were in many ways organized around war, offering great status and support for warriors. They even supported soldiers raping, pillaging, exterminating, and enslaving enemies.

Yes, trying to create more local social support for war might well help create the next rise of war. Which could be a terrible thing. (Yes my even talking about this could help cause it, but even here I prioritize honesty.) However, if preparing more sooner for war helps nations to win or at least survive the next war peak, do you really want it to be only other nations who gain that advantage?

Given the stakes here, it seems terribly important to better understand the causes of the recent decline in war deaths. I’ve proposed a farmers-returning-to-foragers story, whose simplest version predicts a continuing decline. But I’m far from confident of that simplest version, which would not have predicted the world wars as a historical peak. Please fellow intellectuals, let’s figure this out!

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Beware Nggwal

By Robin Hanson · July 22, 2019 3:00 pm · Comments (0)

Consider the fact that this was a long standing social equilibrium:

During an undetermined time period preceding European contact, a gargantuan, humanoid spirit-God conquered parts of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. … Nggwal was the tutelary spirit for a number of Sepik horticulturalist societies, where males of various patriclans were united in elaborate cult systems including initiation grades and ritual secrecy, devoted to following the whims of this commanding entity. …

a way of maintaining the authority of the older men over the women and children; it is a system directed against the women and children, … In some tribes, a woman who accidentally sees the [costumed spirit or the sacred paraphernalia] is killed. … it is often the responsibility of the women to provide for his subsistence … During the [secret] cult’s feasts, it is the senior members who claim the mantle of Nggwal while consuming the pork for themselves. …

During the proper ritual seasons, Ilahita Arapesh men would wear [ritual masks/costumes], and personify various spirits. … move about begging small gifts of food, salt, tobacco or betelnut. They cannot speak, but indicate their wishes with various conventional gestures, …
Despite the playful, Halloween-like aspects of this practice … 10% of the male masks portrayed [violent spirits] , and they were associated with the commission of ritually sanctioned murder. These murders committed by the violent spirits were always attributed to Nggwal.

The costumes of the violent spirits would gain specific insignia after committing each killing, … “Word goes out that Nggwal has “swallowed” another victim; the killer remains technically anonymous, even though most Nggwal members know, or have a strong inkling of, his identity.” … are universally feared, and nothing can vacate a hamlet so quickly as one of these spooks materializing out of the gloom of the surrounding jungle. … Nggwal benefits some people at the expense of others. Individuals of the highest initiation level within the Tambaran cult have increased status for themselves and their respective clans, and they have exclusive access to the pork of the secret feasts that is ostensibly consumed by Nggwal. The women and children are dominated severely by Nggwal and the other Tambaran cult spirits, and the young male initiates must endure severe dysphoric rituals to rise within the cult. (more)

So in these societies, top members of secret societies could, by wearing certain masks, literally get away with murder. These societies weren’t lawless; had these men committed murder without the masks, they would have been prosecuted and punished.

Apparently many societies have had such divisions between an official legal system that was supposed to fairly punish anyone for hurting others, along side less visible but quite real systems whereby some elites could far more easily get away with murder. Has this actually been the usual case in history?

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Pay More For Results

By Robin Hanson · July 10, 2019 5:40 pm · Comments (1)

A simple and robust way to get others to do useful things is to “pay for results”, i.e., to promise to make particular payments for particular measurable outcomes. The better the outcomes, the more someone gets paid. This approach has long been used in production piece-rates, worker bonuses, sales commissions, CEO incentive pay, lawyer contingency fees, sci-tech prizes, auctions, and outcome-contracts in PR, marketing, consulting, IT, medicine, charities, development, and in government contracting more generally. 

Browsing many articles on the topic, I mostly see either dispassionate analyses of its advantages and disadvantages, or passionate screeds warning against its evils, especially re sacred sectors like charity, government, law, and medicine. Clearly many see paying for results as risking too much greed, money, and markets in places where higher motives should reign supreme.

Which is too bad, as those higher motives are often missing, and paying for results has a lot of untapped potential. Even though the basic idea is old, we have yet to explore a great many possible variations. For example, many of social reforms that I’ve considered promising over the years can be framed as paying for results. For example, I’ve liked science prizes, combinatorial auctions, and:

  1. Buy health, not health care – Get an insurer to sell you both life & health insurance, so that they lose a lot of money if you are disabled, in pain, or dead. Then if they pay for your medical expenses, you can trust them to trade those expenses well against lower harm chances.
  2. Fine-insure-bounty criminal law system – Catch criminals by paying a bounty to whomever proves that a particular person did a particular crime, require everyone to get crime insurance, have fines as the official punishment, and then let insurers and clients negotiate individual punishments, monitoring, freedoms, and co-liabilities. 
  3. Prediction & decision markets – There’s a current market probability, and if you buy at that price you expect to profit if you believe a higher probability. In this way you are paid to fix any error in our current probabilities, via winning your bets. We can use the resulting market prices to make many useful decisions, like firing CEOs. 

We have some good basic theory on paying for results. For example, paying your agents for results works better when you can measure the things that you want sooner and more accurately, when you are more risk-averse, and when your agents are less risk-averse. It is less less useful when you can watch your agents well, and you know what they should be doing to get good outcomes.

The worst case is when you are a big risk-neutral org with lots of relevant expertise who pays small risk-averse individuals or organizations, and when you can observe your agents well and know roughly what they should do to achieve good outcomes, outcomes that are too complex or hidden to measure. In this case you should just pay your agents to do things the right way, and ignore outcomes.

In contrast, the best case for paying for results is when you are more risk-averse than your agents, you can’t see much of what they do, you don’t know much about how they should act to best achieve good outcomes, and you have good fast measure of the outcomes you want. So this theory suggests that ordinary people trying to get relatively simple things from experts tend to be good situations for paying for results, especially when those experts can collect together into large more-risk-neutral organizations.

For example, when selling a house or a car, the main outcome you care about is the sale price, which is quite observable, and you don’t know much about how best to sell to future buyers. So for you a good system is to hold an auction and give it to the agent who offers the highest price. Then that agent can use their expertise to figure out how to best sell your item to someone who wants to use it.

While medicine is complex and can require great expertise, the main outcomes that you want from medicine are simple and relatively easy to measure. You want to be alive, able to do your usual things, and not in pain. (Yes, you also have a more hidden motive to show that you are willing to spend resources to help allies, but that is also easy to measure.) Which is why relatively simple ways to pay for health seem like they should work. 

Similarly, once we have defined a particular kind of crime, and have courts to rule on particular accusations, then we know a lot about what outcomes we want out of a crime system: we want less crime. If the process of trying to detect or punish a criminal could hurt third parties, then we want laws to discourage those effects. But with such laws in place, we can more directly pay to catch criminals, and to discourage the committing of crimes. 

Finally when we know well what events we are trying to predict, we can just pay people who predict them well, without needing to know much about their prediction strategies. Overall, paying for results seems to still have enormous untapped potential, and I’m doing my part to help that potential be realized.

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