> as for your second point -- i'm not sure it's not happening right now.

That's both the curse and the beauty of it. As the perpetrators of such a scheme you could totally get away with it and we'd all be as oblivious about it as could be.

Johnny has ambitions to go and make some real and unfortunate changes, let's give him a really well paying job and shower him with toys until he's distracted to the point of giving up his ambitions. Manipulation works better the more subtle it is and the longer before a certain course of action the smaller the deviation from the path to avoid the course of action entirely.