[einpoklum]

I would guess that's a poor thought experiment, because most of us - myself included - don't have a good grasp of what various things cost to make work. And then when you look at the relative points on the sliders you think "Oh, but X is much more critical than Y, surely I can't spend so little on it relative to my spending on Y".

Not to mention the complex semantics and effects of debt in sovereign finance, and actions like increasing or decreasing the money supply etc.

[csoups14]

You'd also have some very large but currently unknowable number of people underfunding Medicare and Social Security but still expecting to be able to draw out of it when they're older and demanding they be allowed to do so when they're seniors.

[cm11]

I would guess that we don't know because we don't interact with it at all and this would have us interact with it. No doubt that few people would really study very hard or that this would suddenly make everyone experts, but I suppose having to deal with it a tiny bit might lead to a tiny sense of the mechanics or scale. Like when you have to sit through the airplane safety talk, my guess is most people are still just going to thrash around over seats in an emergency of maybe ask each other what to do, but I guess people now know they're supposed to wear their seatbelts or that there's a mask in the ceiling? And you also probably do get a few more citizen experts than you had before.

Still, yeah, as an experiment it doesn't seem likely to work. There is probably something to putting people a little closer to the action though.