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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off.

If a total stranger walked up to me and offered me this amazing chance to get in on the ground floor, but I have to take it up now or the opportunity will be gone, of course I'd assume they were a scammer and I don't live in a country that is particularly corrupt.

the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy

Or greedy. This is how con artists work, after all: appealing to the greed and cupidity and stupidity of the mark, who thinks they are too smart to be easily fooled and who is just venal enough that they won't look a gift horse in the mouth when the prospect of easy riches is dangled before them.

None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.

Yeah, that's common sense. But (at least by this example) the book seems to be trying to sell itself by dressing up common-sense observations in 'counter-intuitive' ways in order to seem edgy and new and worth buying for its insights.

Old boring way of putting this: A fool and his money are soon parted Fancy new pop-business book way of putting this: Did you know the best amount of fraud is "some"? Bet ya didn't!

EDIT: Reading the reviews on the Amazon site, it seems to be less that this author has a deep economic theory and more that he's concluding "since fraud of some sort always happens, and has always happened throughout human history, then it must have some sort of purpose":

"It is highly unlikely that the optimal level of fraud is zero." (Pg. 227.) " ...when something keeps happening in different times and places, it's likely to be an equilibrium phenomenon linked to the deep underlying economic structure." (Pg. 157.) The event described "happens so often and reproduces itself so exactly that it's got to reflect a fairly deep and ubiquitous incentive problem which will be very difficult to remove."

There may be some point there about evolutionary history and why we are wired to take advantage of others, but it is less to do with economics and more to do with "this is how humans are". You could make the same point about "it is highly unlikely the optimal level of murder/rape/beating children to death is zero". Some small fraction of people throughout history have always beaten children to death! This is just the price of living in a high-trust society!

You could make the same point about "it is highly unlikely the optimal level of murder/rape/beating children to death is zero".

yes_chad.png. See this sketch: there comes a point where the marginal cost of further investment in child protection is greater than the expected return, and those resources would be better allocated elsewhere. No one thinks that spending the entire annual budget to ensure that not a single child dies a premature violent death is a sensible way to allocate resources, which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business. Alternatively, a country in which child murder literally never happens probably curtails its citizens' liberties so aggressively that it would be profoundly undesirable to live there for other reasons.

Maybe you think this point is so trivial and obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but I actually don't think it is. During Covid, I encountered plenty of people who really did claim to believe that there was no amount of economic hardship they didn't think it was worthwhile enduring if it meant a few people in their eighties got to live an extra year or two.

Otoh it turned out that the optimal level of smallpox was in fact 0. Don't confuse "eliminating this bad thing isn't worth infinite resources" with "eliminating this bad thing requires infinite resources".

Fair point. I do, however, feel reasonably confident that even if we devoted 100% of a country's budget to preventing e.g. premature violent deaths of children in that country, we wouldn't be successful and the side effects unrelated to premature violent deaths of children would be disastrous.

Your smallpox example reminds me of an old post by Scott:

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”

Eliminating a deadly microorganism is a piece of piss. Eliminating the fact that people will sometimes tell other people things that they know to be untrue, and be believed? I don't even know where you'd begin.

which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business

I hope it is with you in your social circle as with the anarchist in "The Man Who Was Thursday" 😁

"I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”

Though it would be a unique selling point for a creche or daycare: "Some small number of premature violent death may occur on these premises, kindly remember that, should it happen to your children, you are helping preserve our liberties".

Those daycares exist all over the place. They're called Scout camps, of which there are hundreds; rock climbing gyms of which there are nearly one thousand and martial arts gyms of which there are over 40,000 most of which run various kids programs and make their money that way; more than one million kids play tackle football, mostly boys, while more than a million girls compete in horseback riding.

Everyone knows there are risks in those activities, yet place their kids in them anyway. Everyone who participated in them knows someone maimed or killed. But they're wildly popular.

I have absolutely no idea what point you're trying to make.

Just that in the week where there's new stories about the young girls drowned in the Texas floods, a statement about "a certain amount of violent deaths of children happens and we shouldn't get our knickers in a twist over that" sounds a little tone-deaf.

Good thing that's not what I said, so.

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