Society’s stated preference is things like healthy food, paying as opposed to ads (not being the product), and no notifications.

Society’s revealed preference is McDonald’s, watching YouTube ads, and letting apps send whatever notifications they want to.

In general people care about the trade offs between cost and convenience, between cost and style, and not at all about anything so mundane as value, privacy, or peace of mind.

> Society’s revealed preference is McDonald’s

Without government restrictions, is society's revealed preference also widespread use of hard drugs?

Ever since opium wars, unadressed drug use was a problem that required active internevtion.

Active interventions gave us war on drugs with hundreds of thousands of civilians dead (or rather millions if you count things like oxycontin -> fentanyl and other similar side effects), tens if not hundreds of millions of lives fucked up, and seeing a superpower losing a war with... some chemicals. No thank you

So the answer to the wrong intervention is no intervention at all?

It's a common issue in America. The Game book basically already discussed this with dating. That stated preferences are total junk for significant portions of humanity. They say they want "idea" but really want, "pretend to believe in 'idea', while acting the horrible way you actually respond to."

Most of America is a "bait and switch" or a "rug pull." This article basically talks about those issues with workers. [1] America sayssss "work hard, be loyal, be honest, be virtuous" how America acts is "Reward lazy humans, reward dishonesty / backstabbing, reward vice (pride, lust, greed are pretty much America)."

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221... Stanley, Matthew L., Christopher B. Neck, and Christopher P. Neck. "Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 106 (2023): 104442.