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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.
MontrealVancouver 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.How much economic development can you have when all the trusting investors hand over money to scam artists who don't produce the goods/services/returns on investment they promised but instead decamp to the Bahamas to live the high life?
I get the point about trust being necessary, but if everyone is so trusting they can be plucked like pigeons, then eventually there won't be any trust. Montreal or other Scam Capitals are going to become notorious, investors won't invest even in legitimate proposals because the risk this is a plausible scammer is too high, and economic development will slow down anyway.
The optimum is to have as little fraud as possible. No fraud at all may be impossible to achieve, given human nature, but surely trying for "as close to zero as possible" is the better option than "eh, shit happens, let the fools who fall for scams be weeded out by natural selection, it's nature's way".
Yes, and as described in the book, this is exactly what happens without sufficient protections against fraud.
"as close to zero as possible" sounds pretty much like Dan Davies's preference for how much fraud there should be in an economy.
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