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When a statistic isn't just a statistic
Like many, I was saddened by the news of the Texas flooding and the girls who were in the path of the engorged river. Natural disasters happen, but they don't always victimize school aged girls at a summer retreat. Yet I mentally filed the disaster in the way I do most disasters: the optimal quantity of flooding deaths is not zero, the odds of something bad happening to somebody somewhere is quite high, children need to do things in the outdoors even if there is some risk. And this framing, while dispassionate, isn't incorrect.
Yesterday, one of the bodies was discovered and identified. She wasn't some no-name in a far-flung state. Her family lives three streets over from mine. Her brother and my oldest daughter were in the same class last year. These are neighbors, and in our close-knit community, something akin to extended family. Suddenly, this feels personal.
A number of years ago, I was teaching my oldest to ride a bike. She was a natural, balancing and peddling within minutes of first riding. Within an hour she was shifting gears, accelerating and decelerating, making turns with adroitness. After several hours of practice in a parking lot I decided she was ready for the hilly streets near our house. Unfortunately, there was one thing I had forgotten to teach her in the flat safety of the parking lot: how to brake. She went down the hill outside our house, increasing in speed and with no ability to stop herself. Finally, she hit the curb and somersaulted into the grass of a yard. Despite the relatively soft landing she was scraped and bleeding over most of her body.
So many things could have gone wrong. She could have hit a car. She could have landed in the street and been flayed by the asphalt.
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
"Lying For Money" is a good book, but this turn of phrase is bad. The optimal quantity of [bad thing] is 0; the question is what trade-offs are optimal, given the available options for reducing bad things.
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
The ideal or perfect amount of [bad thing] is zero. But we don't live in a perfect world, and it's pointless wasting our time on pie-in-the-sky fantasies of what it would be like if we did. As long as there is division of labour in a scarcity economy, people will need to trust each other to get anything done, and where there is trust there are opportunities for fraud.
I think this is backwards. No one pays with fraud or murder to create a higj-trust / free society. A high-trust / free society comes about when the amount of fraud and deaths is so low, they're not worth bothering with to preempt.
No, and the book quite lucidly explains why this counterintuitive assertion is actually true. Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy. Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists. By contrast, in a society where nobody trusts anyone else, people are famously unwilling to lend out their money, which results in low rates of fraud but also sluggish economic development.
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
The book is not counter-intuitive. It's wrong. At best it's doing the old gimmick of phrasing something true in a deliberately counter-intuitive way, to make it's reader feel smart, but the way you're describing it, it sounds just plain wrong.
And in this society, if a stranger approached you, introduced themselves as an entrepreneur, and offered to let you in on the ground floor of their operation for a small loan of million dollars, would you consider taking them up on the offer? Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
Of course, and the book catalogues many examples of boom-bust cycles of the type you're describing. A high-trust society (or subculture, or community) is founded -> scam artists get wind of this and exploit it for all the alpha it's worth -> after a few successful frauds, people start getting a lot more cautious and risk-averse -> realising that it's no longer a high-trust society, the scam artists depart for greener pastures. None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
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.
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.
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":
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!
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.
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