Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

That illustrates the converse. People will absolutely try to avoid future problems if they are the ones that bear the consequences for them. Use birth control (or put your kid on it) so you don't have to raise another child for 20+ years. Don't hang out with that volatile "friend" who always seems to be having another crisis. Fix your roof so you don't lose the house. Don't go into debt because you're the one who will be paying interest on it.

But almost by definition, bearing the consequences of your own decisions implies that there's no transaction.

It's interesting and fitting that the article begins with a discussion of Toyota. People buy Toyotas because they want to avoid problems. The biggest selling point is reliability; a Toyota's value prop is that you can keep it for 20 years and you won't have unexpected things go wrong with it. Toyota has managed to turn this into a sales driver because they appeal to the self-interest of a buyer who will be living with the car for 10-20 years. There are thousands of individual decisions that Toyota makes to avoid problems with their cars, starting with a very conservative aversion to new technology or anything that is engineeringly risky. Each individual one is invisible to the customer, and often comes with significant costs in isolation. But because their sales driver is "be reliable at all costs" and they've ingrained that into the culture, they've built an organization that is willing to make these feature trade-offs for reliability.

Also, an interesting corollary is "Oftentimes, a good life is lived with few transactions."

https://youtu.be/ndeB_BpsRGk?is=03lR2DMyhfwkT3L-

Kids in Africa who would have otherwise died from measles, but didn't get measles in the first place because some people decided to fund and make vaccines and thousands of unnamed and unrecognized volunteers helped distribute and administer these vaccines...

These kids are alive and they don't even know that they wouldn't be alive if it weren't for some people they may never meet, and whose names they'll never know.

Also tangentially, reminds me of an excerpt of a book called The Trigger Effect I read as a kid, which said something along the lines of, when you use your car's brakes to prevent an accident, your life depends on whoever assembled the brakes and quality controlled them. You'll never know their name, and they'll never know that they saved your life.

My position is: do not ban (make illegal!) everything that has statistically significant risk for one's health (like smoking, alcohol, mountain climbing, spelunking, bike-riding, horse-riding, car racing, NFL...).

So no, I do not see why banning smoking altogether is a good idea (and no, I am not a smoker — I never was either). I can get behind increased health premiums or heavy taxation, banning smoking in communal spaces...