Human self-interest drives us to invent profit schemes heedless of lasting harm

Evidence

Is there a lesson in all this? Sure. Human beings, going about their business, striving relentlessly to stash away some bucks, will continuously come up with new ways to get their hands on a little bit more of this and that. Leave us to ourselves and we are ingenious, individually and collectively—clever at seizing, adroit at amassing, and relatively heedless as to the consequences. We will destroy for money—sometimes quickly and savagely, but more often slowly, subtly, surreptitiously, with a smile on our faces and a fond hope that no one will notice—until we’ve got ours. The medium-term effects of this dynamic are never pretty. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 99

Categorization

• CANDY: Unlike resource depletion or pollution, attention extraction proceeds politely and invisibly, with perpetrators smiling while no one notices
• XREF: connects to: Financial self-interest is framed as advancing the common good through free-market logic; Positive incentive systems can be corrupted into subsidies for the very harm they target; Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. (+10 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Financial self-interest is framed as advancing the common good through free-market logic; Positive incentive systems can be corrupted into subsidies for the very harm they target; Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Individual self-interest can produce collective flourishing without intention #complicates (0.82) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 467