The government is not the same thing as society. The government is more than willing to burn money pursuing people who break its rules, to pretty significant effect, but individuals and private companies presently lack the requisite sense of pride/aggression/honor/whatever.

One obvious source of this problem is that n-tit-for-tat behavior in humans is moderated by testosterone levels, which have been declining precipitously. 100 years ago you had personal vendettas between CEOs driving corporate policy, which is unironically good for society because it encourages real non-kayfabeized competition and the punishment of antisocial corporate behavior.

> problem is that n-tit-for-tat behavior in humans is moderated by testosterone levels, which have been declining precipitously

sorry, what?

Could you clarify which part of that was confusing/unclear/you disagree with? Happy to expand on it.

n-tit-for-tat behavior is the family of game-theoretic strategies where you respond to a defection by defecting one or more times, but if the other participants don't defect then neither do you. Most societies encode this kind of behavior as some system of honor and propriety, where you don't transgress against another person unless they transgress against you, and then you are free to engage in various degrees of retaliation.

tit-for-tat would be proportional response, and then you have a whole continuum of disproportionate response up to grim trigger (infinity-tit-for-tat), which would correspond to a blood feud or something.

ntft strategies are known to be highly performant or even optimal in many settings, and are very easy to compute.

As testosterone levels decrease, the viable societal distribution of n goes down, at some point drifting into sub-1, which pushes you into a sub-optimal strategy domain.

The historical structures that lead to the US's incarceration rate are not based on vengeance. They are in place to preserve existing pre-Emancipation power structures and continue to provide a source of unpaid labor.

When you're directing vengeance at the wrong problems, then yes.

Yes, and there's no reason to think that if society was more aggressive and vengeful, vengeance would be directed towards anybody but the most vulnerable. Patent trolls would do just fine in that kind of world.