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In your sad, twisted world, only the lawyers win. Rental agreements have already ballooned into legal tomes no first-time lessee could ever understand. If they

by fra 11y ago

In your sad, twisted world, only the lawyers win. Rental agreements have already ballooned into legal tomes no first-time lessee could ever understand. If they now have to spell out penalty for a variety of different breaches, they will become much worse (why not a single, higher penalty? That will get abused to extort tenants who commit minor violations...) IMO it should not be about contracts. You should enter agreements in good faith and there should be social consequences for doing otherwise (reputation ruined, ... etc.). Be excellent to each other.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> IMO it should not be about contracts. You should enter agreements in good faith and there should be social consequences for doing otherwise (reputation ruined, ... etc.). Be excellent to each other. Exactly this! The consequence of letting people abuse trust on massive scale is more complicated contracts, which is a worse outcome than if everyone just agreed to act in good faith.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Yes, things would be much simpler if our societies were composed of angels rather than humans.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That we aren't angels doesn't mean we should give up on striving to be them though.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      It does, OTOH, mean that it is irrational to draft business contracts on the assumption that your counterparty is going to conduct themselves as one, absent some extraordinary evidence that the particular circumstances are unusual in that way.
imgabe 11y ago
By all means, if you want to depend on social consequences to enforce business contracts, you are welcome to do so. Some people are able to operate that way in areas where there are limited players and everyone's reputation is well known or easily discoverable. Companies like Uber and AirBnB with reviews and ratings systems actually bring us much closer to this being a reality. If social consequences were sufficient, we wouldn't have invented this whole legal system in the first place.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Rating system is actually the one thing that I think is good about Uber (though firing your emp^H^H^Hcontractor if he drops below 4.3/5 is not). Social consequences are not good for everything, but there are a lot of areas when there are better than economic approach. The problem is that economic incentives are much stronger than social, so the latter can be easily destroyed by the former. The classic example would be the fact that you absolutely, positively don't want to pay people for donating blood - it immediately leads to contamination of blood banks, as people replace the sense of duty with an opportunity for free cash, and thus stop caring about things like not donating blood when they are sick. Since social incentives are fragile, you want to defend them in the areas they work better than economic ones - hence the opposition to AirBnB.

by fra 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> IMO it should not be about contracts. You should enter agreements in good faith and there should be social consequences for doing otherwise (reputation ruined, ... etc.). Be excellent to each other. Exactly this! The consequence of letting people abuse trust on massive scale is more complicated contracts, which is a worse outcome than if everyone just agreed to act in good faith.

dragonwriter 11y ago
Yes, things would be much simpler if our societies were composed of angels rather than humans.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That we aren't angels doesn't mean we should give up on striving to be them though.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    It does, OTOH, mean that it is irrational to draft business contracts on the assumption that your counterparty is going to conduct themselves as one, absent some extraordinary evidence that the particular circumstances are unusual in that way.

imgabe 11y ago

By all means, if you want to depend on social consequences to enforce business contracts, you are welcome to do so. Some people are able to operate that way in areas where there are limited players and everyone's reputation is well known or easily discoverable. Companies like Uber and AirBnB with reviews and ratings systems actually bring us much closer to this being a reality. If social consequences were sufficient, we wouldn't have invented this whole legal system in the first place.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Rating system is actually the one thing that I think is good about Uber (though firing your emp^H^H^Hcontractor if he drops below 4.3/5 is not). Social consequences are not good for everything, but there are a lot of areas when there are better than economic approach. The problem is that economic incentives are much stronger than social, so the latter can be easily destroyed by the former. The classic example would be the fact that you absolutely, positively don't want to pay people for donating blood - it immediately leads to contamination of blood banks, as people replace the sense of duty with an opportunity for free cash, and thus stop caring about things like not donating blood when they are sick. Since social incentives are fragile, you want to defend them in the areas they work better than economic ones - hence the opposition to AirBnB.