Comment by e63f67dd-065b

I said this somewhere else, but there’s 2 things at play here:

- A utopia where people don’t defect in prisoners dilemmas (most types of crimes like shoplifting: the store won’t have to hire loss prevention and cashiers, and you pay less for their reduced costs) is ideal, but:

- Such a utopia doesn’t and can’t exist because defection individually increases utility at the cost of everybody else. Hence cashiers, loss prevention, KYC, etc.

Thus the real world is a careful optimisation problem where we have to search for an equilibrium at which society as a whole benefits the most. People can argue all day about where this is, because the trade offs involved are non-obvious:

- More surveillance means, all else being equal, less crime, but police officers can defect too and only arrest minorities and use said surveillance for something else, etc.

The problem is walking through a very high-dimensional search space, and we humans are had at it. There’s no real solution though, because individual incentives don’t line up to solve it.