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This seems analogous to the obesity epidemic that's also been called a "crisis" in many Western nations. The revealed preference of many people is that they would prefer to indulge in high calorie foods and lack of exercise, and then they suffer health issues including possibly early death later on. This is an eminently reasonable preference, especially in modern Western nations, where the deliciousness and diversity of food is at incredibly high levels and the importance of physical fitness and downsides of bad health issues are at incredibly low levels. It seems that at least some of these obese people regret their eating/exercise decisions that caused their health issues, but then all that means is that their revealed preference is to indulge in their youth, then later on suffer the negative consequences including regretting those indulgences, rather than to not indulge and to not suffer health consequences of obesity by not being obese.
I suppose this points to the difficulty of figuring out how exactly to weight revealed preferences when that preference includes both a decision and regretting that decision. In those cases, do we just say that everything is hunky dory, since they're meeting their preference of regretting their present decision in the future? Or do we say that something has gone wrong, because preferring to regret something is a concept that's in tension with itself?
I'm sure exceptions exist, but in my experience, most obese individuals I’ve encountered fit one or more of the following categories:
a) They struggle with poverty,
b) They deal with depression or isolation, or
c) They're part of a family with substance abuse issues, like alcoholism.
Revealed preferences are not a great way to model addictive or stress-driven behavior. Overeating, for example, may appear to be a revealed preference of someone who is depressed, but this behavior is highly contextual. It often vanishes when the individual is removed from those circumstances.
Furthermore, individuals aren't monolithic. Everyone is more like a collection of competing drives wrapped in a trenchcoat. "Revealed preferences" are often better understood as the final outcome of an internal, contingent battle between various drives and impulses, rather than the true essence of a person. What we observe as a preference in the moment may simply reflect which drive happened to win out in that context, not a consistent, rational choice.
As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.
Yes, and that's the rub, isn't it? In such cases, do we say that someone's myopic short-term drives are their "true" preferences that ought to override whatever they genuinely value in the long term, or do we say that what they genuinely value in the long term are their "true" preferences that ought to override their myopic short-term drives?
If it turns out that some significant proportion of women who choose not to have children when they can end up regretting it when they age up to when they no longer can - a big if, IMHO - then should the next generation of young women celebrate them and follow in their footsteps, since those older women got to live out their short-term drives in their youth, short-term drives that they would have had considerable difficulty living out even just 100 years ago due to the lower freedoms and opportunities offered to women back then? Or should the next generation of young women see these older women as warnings for how they could end up suffering in the long run due to following their own short-term drives? I could see different people having different answers to these depending on their values.
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