> If someone is motivated out of self-interest to behave in one way or another, you can likely use that same motivation to bring about a different behavior. The complexity of the remedy is dependent more on the rigidity of the system incentivizing the harmful behavior than on the individual.
Sure, you can change the behavior, but it's not solving the fundamental problem that the person can't be trusted. The next situation that arises where doing harm is incentivized, they'll do harm again. In the worst case, this just allows sociopaths to move on to the next loophole as soon as you close the previous loophole.
This isn't normal. Normal people have a moral compass and can be trusted to try not to do harm even when there are incentives to do harm.
The reason corporate culture pushes this "incentives solve everything" narrative is specifically because it allows the people at the top to move from loophole to loophole. The vast majority of people involved aren't at the extreme of the sociopathy spectrum, but there's a mix of naivete, denial, and kool-aid drinking which keeps this ideology alive.
It's telling that putting people in jail, seizing personal assets, etc., are incentives, but never get brought up when people are pushing this "incentives solve everything" narrative. Limited liability is sacrosanct, allowing the sociopaths to hide behind corporations. For example, someone at Ford made the decision to literally kill people for short-term profits with the Ford Pinto, but if that person's name was ever exposed to the public I can't find it--they certainly didn't go to jail or pay any real cost. Instead, the damages were paid by Ford shareholders and workers unrelated to the crime, and those actually responsible likely just moved on with their careers.
> If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)
I have no idea what experts you're citing here, but I suspect that they're describing a formal education which prepares people for working, which is not what I'm talking about when I say "education". If a person is causing harm out of ignorance, the education needed to correct it usually comes in the form "Hey when you do this, it's causing , could you do instead?"
In any case, we don't get to choose solutions based on how easy they are: we have to choose the solution based on the problem.
If someone is causing harm out of ignorance it can usually be solved with education. If someone is causing harm out of malice or because they're following incentives, it can usually solved by removing their power to cause harm.
Changing incentives for a person who's causing harm out of ignorance might cause them to re-analyze the situation and learn that they made a mistake, but it's not the most direct way to solve the problem. And changing incentives if a person is malicious or simply following incentives, doesn't solve the more fundamental problem that they can't be trusted to try not to cause harm, as described above.
Changing incentives simply isn't the right solution in either case.