Want to hear a horrifying story?

A middle-class woman and her husband struggle with home and car payments. The woman wants children but feels she can’t afford them.

In a stroke of luck, she inherits $80,000 from her grandmother — enough to pay down debts and even start a family.

She uses it to build a driveway for her father-in-law’s fancy fishing cabin. The reason: “My husband and his father REALLY like fishing…”

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I don’t know this woman. Maybe the decision made sense.

But if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be surprised. People make terrible decisions all the time — giving away years of their lives, or tens of thousands of dollars, for very little benefit.

Life would still be hard without this. We’d still have cancer and hurricanes and armed robbery. But much of our misery is self-inflicted.

Terrible decisions

By “terrible decision”, I don’t mean:

• Impulsive acts, like a bar fight that ends in murder.
• Premeditated crime, where criminals improve their lives by hurting others.
• Bad policy, where corrupt politicians and interest groups take our money.

I’m talking about decisions where nearly everyone ends up worse off, including the decision-maker. It’s a fuzzy boundary, but I think the $80,000 driveway counts.

So do these:

• A person tries fentanyl for the first time, at the risk of permanently altering their sense of pleasure.
• Someone with no business acumen uses their life savings to start a restaurant, which fails within five years.
• Parents force their gay child into conversion therapy, hurting a person they love and creating lifelong resentment for an intervention that approximately never works.
• A janitor spends years saving money to fly his daughter to Disneyworld, but never thinks about taking the bus.

There are reasons people do these things. But if they made other decisions, their lives would predictably go better.

How can we reduce terrible decisions?

For the rest of this post, I’m picturing the U.S., but the ideas could apply anywhere.

We have social infrastructure for some of this: drug rehab, small business counseling, legal efforts to stop conversion therapy.

And there are bloggers and podcasters who share good advice widely: the driveway story came from the forum of Mr. Money Mustache, who I’d guess has prevented hundreds of equally terrible decisions.

Nonetheless, people keep making them.¹ How can we stop this from happening?

On its face, this is a ridiculous question. There are a thousand kinds of terrible decision, and you can’t monitor 300 million people. But there are also a thousand ways to commit crimes, and we still try to stop those — at least the most damaging ones.

What would it look like to build social infrastructure for reducing terrible decisions in general, the way we try to reduce crime with police and courts?

“Decision police” aren’t the right approach; people have a right to make (most) terrible decisions.

But what about decision counselors? Here’s a half-baked sketch:

• Once a year, the government offers you $150 to visit a decision counselor, with a small payment to your employer so you can take a half-day. It isn’t mandatory like the DMV or jury duty, but it’s still a normal thing to do.
• It’s the same counselor you saw last year! You talk about whatever’s new — family, health, money, school, career. (You answered a few questions ahead of time.)
• She isn’t an expert on any one topic, but she knows enough, and has enough AI support, to notice issues, ask follow-up questions, and refer you to public resources.
  • “Have you thought about ways to save money on that Disney trip?”
  • “I know a pastor who’s helped families in your situation — want his number?”
  • “You’re thinking about X College? Here’s some data on its job placement rate.”
  • “Starting a family is more affordable than you might think; there are federal tax breaks and our state has a baby bonus program. Want to learn more?”
• If you pay attention and engage in conversation, you get the money. The counselor gets evaluated… somehow.²

Decision counselors are reasonably well-paid state employees. The jobs are taken by the kinds of pleasant, competent people who might otherwise become actuaries, librarians, or social workers. As government jobs go, it’s appealing — at least compared to running a post office or teaching algebra.

Meanwhile, the people who take the $150 will often be those without much access to good advice from peers or paid professionals. They could ignore the advice, but they’ll also know the stories about counselors helping people find apartments or saving them from scammers. If you’re paid to be there anyway, why not ask a few questions?

The service isn’t cheap. But the government already buys you 30 minutes a year with a doctor making $250,000; it can swing 60 minutes with a counselor making $80,000.³

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This literal idea probably can’t work. Even with AI help, you’d need to train a few hundred thousand counselors to cover the U.S., and the government would find plenty of ways to corrupt the idea.⁴ But I think we should look for other ways to get tough on terrible decisions, and to raise society’s bar until more of the ideas that ruin lives are safely underwater.

1. Including me: I’ve made two decisions I consider “terrible”, and I have fifty years to make more.
2. Unlike teachers or cops, the counselors work with adults and try to make them happy, so maybe there’s a way to get useful feedback from the clients. We could survey them six months later to evaluate the advice. Or just suck it up and see what happens, as with most public services.
3. Plus a call or two, in case your inheritance arrives the day after your check-in.
4. Some states might encourage conversion therapy.