“Do folks have any scope to make choices that differ from yours in your ideal world?”

BTW, tell that to Mr Palmer

Plan for smokers? Health system treats them as best they can using the money that smokers paid in via excise taxes that are roughly three times higher than smokers’ aggregate health costs even leaving aside time discounting (govt could earn money on tobacco excise against the future costs).

I’m not sure what plan is needed for high time discount folks given that we already have a superannuation system. If we were arguing for its elimination, then we’d need to address that: I’d tend to recommend a slow phase in that’s age-linked along with compulsory superannuation payments as being something that’s least bad. But I haven’t fixed strong views on which alternative would be best.

Obesity? Why not worry about ladies dating cads too? Do folks have any scope to make choices that differ from yours in your ideal world?

@Augustus

I was raising this as a value judgment – but I was not judging either way.

Personally I think individuals have a better idea of their discount rate – and I think the idea of discount rates are moral. There are of course schools of thought against both these points.

Eric Crampton’s personal attributes aside, there are large parts of society that do not actively plan for their future. Obesity, savings rates, smoking – its pretty easy to find examples of people living without consideration of the long term costs. Whats the correlation between those least likely to plan for their future self and those least likely to afford the costs of their future self? And presuming you don’t live in a hermetic vacuum, whats your plan for them?

If we’re going to worry about our present selves screwing over our future selves, what of the harms our present selves do to the wishes of our past selves?

Moreover, don’t we have reasonable evidence that whatever discounting problems individuals might have, governments can barely see past the next election? I have a hard time buying that the government places more weight on my future self’s preferences than I do.