[strogonoff]

I agree that punishment != punishment, and there seem to be many cases where evidence of intentional harm appears to be substantial enough that the majority would support if something was done about it legally, yet unfortunately nothing is done. That aside, I still doubt it would be a fundamental deterrent (it’ll deter some from doing this particular thing, but they’ll find another workaround).

[Schroedingersat]

Well then the key is to align incentives.

If the powerful bear consequences when something bad happens regardless of fault, then power will be wielded to prevent those outcomes rather than enact them. Anyone who does not wish to take that risk can dispose of their power.

[strogonoff]

There’s a hint of the idea that “power should be exceedingly inconvenient, not lucrative, and attract people who ‘irrationally’ want to make the world better as opposed to abusing it”, which I don’t disagree with.

However, there’s another big concept, and that is “do not fire an employee who just learned a big and expensive, to you, lesson”. Punishing people simply because they failed, especially in a complex environment with slow onboarding process, is unproductive.

Furthermore, it can sow fear, resentment and distrust. Take China, where a local official risks unpredictable punishment, up to losing their job (or worse), if they fail—such as by allowing COVID cases to happen in their locality. Unfortunately, the side-effect of it is that officials are incentivized to lie up, meaning the government may think the country is COVID-free and be unable to make informed decisions.

This is also why I think COVID lab leak event, if confirmed, should not lead to any repercussions for China in particular. Fear of said repercussions seems likely half of the reason the research is being obscured in the first place, as a result preventing the global community from making informed decisions.

So, if you don’t want such shenanigans to take place in your government (I wouldn’t), you have to agree that whichever human being you elected should be able to make mistakes to learn from them, and thus another measure of their performance should be used.

For example, repeat trend of malicious intent supported by concrete evidence could be a good one.

(And to be make things even trickier, they do not deserve the whole credit in case of any success either. The success or failure of a measure to large extent depends on the whole country and the larger context it exists in. There are situations where one can only win, and situations where losing the least is the best outcome.)

Incentives should be aligned, but I don’t think punishment is the instrument for that.

[Schroedingersat]

I agree with your perspectives with regard to civil servants, but the people with power I was referring to are the wealthy.

No state actor (other than arguably putin, but I'd characterise his power as individual and not derived from his role as a government agent) is as powerful as eg. rupert murdoch or peter thiel individually, and in aggregate (and in spite of not working together) the 0.01% are vastly more powerful than any state.

If 10% of the fortune 500 were confiscated and redistributed equally every time there's a pandemic or 5% of the amazon is burnt down or there is an unchecked oil spill, then the wealthy would ensure these things do not happen.

[strogonoff]

Yeah, somehow I mistakenly read your “powerful” to mean elected government.

I suppose the main thing that makes rich powerful is the ability to influence government, which is only because power converts to money. If elected officials could not be influenced by rich malicious actors, those actors would lose much leverage.

The second thing is the ability to use money to secure popular support, which can hardly be eliminated unless people stop putting personal gain above true value… which is realistic in post-scarcity.