But I find it doubtful that it would progress to the point of everyone being bonded to commit no crimes.
The costs is an issue of friction; in a vacuum with a spherical Unbreakable Vow, would everyone be bound? Eventually. Why not?
Given the high reported cost, there will be lots of people it's not worth binding, but the exact trade-off will vary. Given the high cost of security and opportunity costs, the cost will have to be large to justify not binding quite a few people (consider how many scores of thousands of dollars it costs to keep an ordinary criminal in prison one year).
The existence of real life government initiatives which have saved large amounts of money and lives have not led the public to conclude that government initiatives in general are trustworthy and should be expanded
Look at what the public does, not what (some of) it says. Governments keep expanding.
Government keeps expanding in some respects, but countries often do not rush to implement programs even when they've proven effective in other countries.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: