The unhelpful comment: unwanted environmental effects have been going on for a long time, starting (possibly) with the Sahara Desert. People generally don't effectively combat problems unless they affect them personally in a scary way.
Examples: we combatted the 'hole in the ozone' problem, but probably only because skin cancer is scary. We sort of made hunting whales illegal, but some countries still do it. Despite efforts to protect western black rhinos starting in the 1930's, they still went extinct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_black_rhinoceros#Popul...
In economics, you can examine the information people to use to make decisions: signalling. A classic example is a species of antelope that leaps into the air to (possibly) signal its health to predators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting
An important problem in human societies, which become complex enough to examine 'memes' as elements of culture (in the original, Dawkins sense, not just the 'familiar pictures with text' sense), is that people learn 'signals' without verifying their accuracy.
Making business more honest is about getting society to use more accurate signals, which comes from, basically, work, but also awareness of the necessity of doing that work.
Defining where, exactly, the boundary between honest and dishonest is can be difficult. Is it dishonest to sell a pair of shoes that costs $2 to make for $200?
The way that more accurate signalling can fix this is that people would not assume that the $200 pair of shoes is better. Or they would not assume that someone who owns the $200 pair of shoes has some beneficial quality that they would currently associate with it.
Will not get into how to improve signal accuracy, as there's no chance my explanation would lead to the solution being used.
Like when the engineer and statistician W. Edwards Deming suggested improvements in manufacturing, but US manufacturers ignored him.
>Why were Deming's views on quality control initially ignored in the United States?
>Following World War II, Deming was largely ignored in the productivity-crazed United States. ... The message Deming made to the United States was that productivity without quality was a dead end. He attempted to teach engineers his philosophy, but the companies they worked for were focused on other things.
>in which a nation improving its economic conditions makes its medium run economic output worse
It doesn't say that economic output would decrease, only that luxury goods sales would decrease. I will take this misunderstanding into future consideration. It is also a misunderstanding to assume that "the other countries all copy it better": the implication is that when the first country uses the system, it buys fewer luxury goods from other countries as well. However, people would be more divided on the benefit of a country BUYING fewer luxury goods. If people want expensive German cars and they can afford them, let them, right? But everyone in Germany presumably wants Germany to SELL more luxury cars.
Also, in regards to whether an unused system could be beneficial, it's worth pointing out that the overtime system was basically invented in the 1930's, during the Great Depression. Companies suggested it as an alternative to further mandated decreases in working hours.
If the tradeoff is if we enact this policy we will have more jobs, a better budget balance and more money collectively and the only downside is our people will buy different types of goods and in particular fewer luxury goods from overseas, I can't imagine why any self-respecting economist wouldn't recommend the policy on purely economic grounds. Assessing which parts of the economy will be worse off and whether there will be a net benefit is literally what the advisers are paid for, and every policy or non-enactment of policy has an opportunity cost.
If the problem is that there exists a cost-free solution to economic growth but other countries adopting it might kill your economic base of exporting luxuries to them if they do it, it's probably safe to assume that either they will do it anyway or that they aren't doing it because they face other political barriers or adverse consequences.
If your solution is protectionism or luxury tax or devaluation or similar it's neither cost free nor something other countries haven't considered and don't have plenty of specific reasons why it's not a good idea for them even if it'll work for your economy.
And time and a half pay legislation not being copied by [e.g] the UK which also had a Great Depression cutting its industrial output, pays great attention to the US economy and generally has more generous labour laws kind of underlines the pointlessness of keeping good ideas secret in the assumption you'll be harmed by everyone else following your lead.
"Most economists are not paid for knowing about the economy. They are paid for telling stories that justify giving more money to rich people."
Or another, more famous quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Is that the case for economists? I can't say for sure. If people don't care whether economists actually try to fix problems, though, then it's more likely that they will not. That's what this question (not precisely a poll, but meant to be) was for.
>If your solution is protectionism or luxury tax or devaluation or similar
It's a way of getting people to work less. Relevant details about why it works 'mechanically' (as opposed to psychologically) include that rich people spend a lower percentage of their income than poor people; rich people tend to buy higher-profit or expensive items, meaning their spending goes to other rich people; limited possibilities for targeted pricing when income inequality is high mean that e.g. there are many homeless people at the same time as many homes are unoccupied; and possibly other things I'm forgetting.
2) Find a way to accept bad design, so it doesn't affect your emotions.
The real solution is to fix the world so it has less bad design. This is about both making people act more intelligently in the present, and ensuring that at the very least, people do not become stupider in the far future (and, hopefully, become at least a little smarter).
This solution involves significant changes to the entire world.
